The other weekend I had the great opportunity to visit the Beamish open-air museum in County Durham. I was staying with friends near Sunderland for the weekend and their suggestion that we went there was a very good one. I can heartily recommend the museum to anyone interested in our industrial history – and particularly that of Northern England.
Not only that, the Museum is currently offering a special deal where for £16 you get a year’s admission. Well, it’s worth that for just one visit – you need to allocate an entire day to the site (and still you won’t get round it all).
Both my friends have been involved with Beamish over the years and as a result they knew all the cool places to go. There are quite a few buildings and other items on-site, each having been painstakingly dismantled, brought to the site, and rebuilt.
The centrepiece, I suppose, is a rebuilt town street, set in 1913, with a terrace of houses (including an early 20th century dentist, a pianoforte teacher’s house and much more) and shops including a Co-Op, a sweet shop with sweeties made on the premises, a garage, a bank, and the most recent addition, a Masonic Hall with a comprehensive display of artefacts and regalia. There’s also an excellent cafeteria!
There’s also a Waggonway, set in 1825, where you can travel for a few hundred yards behind a replica early steam locomotive (see below); a Colliery Village circa 1913 and an old Manor on the hill. The different areas are linked by period buses and trams.
The period covered is broadly Victorian/Edwardian, but some locations (such as the Waggonway and the Manor, which are set in 1825) are set in earlier periods. Everywhere there are staff members (in costume) who will tell you about the old practices and explain what you’re seeing. I really couldn’t fault them.
This is a really tremendous place to visit and I can’t recommend it enough – I’ll be back as soon as I can.
I took some video while I was there and present them below. All three items are hand-held so I’m afraid they are a little wobbly at times, but hopefully they will give you a feel for some aspects of the place.
This first one is of the Pockerley Waggonway, where we travelled for a short distance behind the “Steam Elephant”, an early steam locomotive. We see the journey from an open coach and also from the track-side, and the trip is preceded by some background from a staff member.
Pockerley Waggonway at Beamish Museum from Richard Elen on Vimeo.
The second item is also from the Waggonway area: it’s a demonstration of a traditional Pole Lathe, used by a “bodger” to make things like table and chair legs and other items that could be turned from wood. The operator, William Slassor, describes its principles, operation, and how it was used.
Pole Lathe at Beamish Museum from Richard Elen on Vimeo.
And finally, a short video of a gentleman playing a German ‘Harmonipan’ street organ in the main street of the reconstructed town.
The instrument is hand-cranked, and turning the handle both operates the bellows that enable the pipes to sound; it also draws a roll of punched paper tape about 2in wide across a what we might call a “reader”, consisting of a row of holes, each connected to a pipe. The bellows pass air to the reader, and where there is a hole in the tape, air passes through and off to the corresponding pipe.
The music is a medley of American tunes, and ends with quite a flourish. I wasn’t able to capture the very beginning of the medley, but I got most of it and what there is effectively captures the feeling of this kind of street entertainment, common in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
‘Harmonipan’ Street Organ at Beamish Museum from Richard Elen on Vimeo.
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