Where to, mate? Courtesy Tyne and Wear Museums.

Visitors to museums in the north east have been recording stories about their favourite objects inside a lilac-coloured London taxi cab.

The taxi, fitted with special camera equipment, has become a mobile ‘diary room’ similar to those in reality TV shows and has been in the North East as part of a nationwide tour collecting stories for the Every Object Tells a Story website.

Commissioned by the DCMS-funded Culture Online team, the site invites people to share the hidden meanings behind unusual or everyday items.

Every Object Tells A Story was created by the Victoria & Albert Museum with Ultralab and Channel 4.

The taxi rolled into the Discovery Museum, Newcastle upon Tyne on April 12-16 and will return on April 30. It also put in appearances at the Bowes Museum and the Hancock Museum. On April 22 it is heading to Shipley Art Gallery before making its way to schools in the region so pupils can share their stories.

"The purpose of the site is to get people to share their stories," Susan Warnock, principal learning officer at Tyne & Wear Museums, told the 24 Hour Museum.

"Everybody has got things tucked away in a cupboard that mean something to them, but unless those stories are passed on they die with the people or get lost. So it’s a really good way of people sharing those special stories."

You wouldn't believe who I had in the back of here the other night... Photo: Alastair Smith © Alastair Smith and 24 Hour Museum.

Items taken from Tyne & Wear Museums’ collection and a selection from the Victoria and Albert Museum are already featured on the site and more than 50 people have already told their stories at museums in the north east.

"We have 200 of our own Tyne & Wear Museums objects on the site with stories from our staff and volunteers or from people like local councillors," added Susan.

"They are personal stories that you don’t usually get to hear in museums," she said. "So, for example, our archaeologists have written about when they dug up a Roman coin rather than the coin itself."

One of the more peculiar objects featured on the site is a stuffed wombat from Australia. It was transported to Britain in a keg of spirit for preservation but, as a woman carried it on her head to the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle, it split open covering her in foul-smelling liquid.

To museums and beyond! Have you got a Buzz with a story to tell? Photo: Alastair Smith © Alastair Smith/ 24 Hour Museum.

Interestingly, when it came to be stuffed the taxidermist mounted the animal as a bi-ped instead of on all fours; not many people in Britain, him included, had seen a wombat before.

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and Brighton & Hove Museums will be adding the stories behind objects in their collection to the website soon.

If you fancy adding any of your own stories to the website, give it a visit: www.everyobject.net.

Alastair Smith is the 24 Hour Museum Renaissance Student Writer in the North East region. Renaissance is the groundbreaking initiative to transform England's regional museums, led by MLA, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council.