BEAMISH OPEN AIR MUSEUM
Step Back into Living History in County Durham
What
was life like in an English coal mining town in the 1800s?
What are the real secrets of turn-of-the-century
Freemasons? What the heck
is a Puffing Billy? To find the answers to all your English industrial
age questions, questions, visit Beamish in Northeast England.
Okay, I’ll
bite. What the heck is Beamish? Begun
in the 1970s as a project of Frank Atkinson, at the time a
director of the Bowes
Museum,
Beamish is a unique Open Air Museum where the history of past
life comes to life
on two hundred acres
in
County Durham
England.
His vision was to create a living experience of the lifetimes
of the mid-industrial revolution that had driven England’s
development, but was crumbling away. The project began by collecting
artifacts,
furnishings and entire
buildings and moving them to a bowl of land surrounding an abandoned
coal mine next to the town of Pockerly in Durham. An entire town
was built of actual original structures, complete with 
trolleys
and busses
down the main street of shops and
houses, a school, farms, steam rail station, colliery coal mine
and a Georgian lord’s manor house.
In fact, an entire community populated with costumed inhabitants
of the period to educate and entertain. The Beamish Open Air
Museum actually
represents two periods - part of the collection represents life
at Pockerly Manor and the Wagonway in bucolic 1825. The town
of Beamish,
Colliery
Village represent the industrial pre-war age of 1913.
Arriving
at the entrance and car park, you can see the landscape of the old
town off in the distance.
After
a stop in the entrance building
for a ticket to the past, you step on a tram car and trundle off, disappearing
into history. Here you can explore the steam railways of the early days
of rail at the Pockerly Waggonway, where replicas of early steam locomotives 
chug
along the track, taking visitors for a ride. The early design of rail
pioneer William Hedley “Puffing Billy” has been added
to a collection which also includes the “Steam Elephant” and
Stevenson’s Locomotion No. 1. Follow pitmen into a real drift mine
at the colliery. Tend the animals at the 1913 Home Farm, and stroll or
ride the trolley down the main street from shop to shop and ask all the
questions you want of the town inhabitants, printers, solicitors, motor
mechanics, clerks, sales people and dentists, what their life is like.
A
recent addition to the buildings of Beamish is a full and complete
Masonic Hall from 1913. The rituals of the Masons are a closely guarded
secret, but here all secrets are exposed on view. Freemasonry was an
integral part of life in English towns at the turn of the century. The
old Masonic Temple was moved from Sunderland to Beamish in 2006 and is
the only one of its kind in Europe permanently one view to the public.
A variety of special events are held nearly every weekend during the
spring and summer. Steam days, Morgan and Triumph car meet, horse plowing
contests, military displays and musters from the Boer war and Napoleonic
era, craft fairs and quilting. Check the website for a full schedule.
A brass band plays in the town park bandstand every Sunday in summer.
Beamish Museum has a traditional old-style coal-fired Fish and Chips shop, with two coal burning stovetops, one for cooking chips the charming old way in beef drippings for that yummy fill your tummy and clog your veins old world feeling, and one for frying the chips in vegetable oil, for those modern anti-Luddites.
Visiting the Beamish Living Museum
The Beamish Museum is open daily from April to October 10am to 5pm. All the sights and activities at Beamish are included in the entrance admission of £16 for adults, £10 children 5 to 16. A family ticket is available in summer for £46. Beamish is 8 miles south of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and 12 miles north of Durham (see Durham Castle and Cathedral) a few minutes off the M1 motorway and A68. The nearest rail station is Chester-le-Street at 4 miles. During winter November to March only the town and tramway are open except Mondays and Fridays, with a reduced admission. © Bargain Travel Europe
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Web Info
Beamish
Open Air Museum
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See Also:
LOCOMOTION
NATIONAL RAILWAY MUSEUM SHILDON
DURHAM
CATHEDRAL AND ST CUTHBERT
THE
SALTBURN SMUGGLERS
NORTH
YORKSHIRE MOORS RAILROAD
YORK
GHOST WALKS AND DUNGEON
