Whenever I’m in the NE of England, I try to get over to Beamish - “The Living Museum of the North”. It’s a wonderful place built around a road/tramway loop on which run vintage buses and trams.
On this occasion (20 November) I was up for the weekend to go to Lumiere in Durham, so nipping over was a chance I couldn’t miss. It was foggy on leaving Durham but approaching Beamish the sun came out and it was gorgeously sunny until the drive home, when the fog closed in again.
Different sites around the tramway loop recreate different eras, each created from buildings that have been lovingly transplanted from their original sites: the Town, for example, is Edwardian, with a Bank, a gorgeous Masonic Hall (rebuilt with the help of the Masons, apparently), a Co-Op department store, sweet shop/factory and lots more. It also has an adjacent Steam Railway and station and a steam-powered fairground.
The Pit Village is perhaps somewhat earlier, and features a colliery and a relatively new addition: a coal-fired fish & chip shop that uses beef dripping to cook with, resulting in utterly tasty meals that you have to queue for twenty minutes or so to get, it’s so popular. Yet another area, Pockerley, is more Georgian, with a Waggonway that features steam locos from the earliest times and Pockerley Old Hall. I’ve talked about Beamish before, here.
From this time of year until Christmas itself, Beamish is having a series of Christmas weekends, including Santa’s Grotto somewhere over by Pockerley I think, complete with snow, an ice-rink in the Colliery Village (above), and decorations up in the Town.
I had to pop into some of the terraced houses, several of which contain businesses, such as a solicitor’s and a dentist — the torture chamber itself is shown below. In those days you would have had the option of (unregulated) nitrous oxide (with a fair risk of death) or cocaine as anaesthetics, the latter effectively removing your short-term memory, so things hurt but you didn’t remember it (rather like intravenous Valium it would appear, which I always loved as an adjunct to dental operations).
Another house included period Christmas decorations in the front room.
Across the street is a little park, with a bandstand, and there was the Murton Colliery Band preparing to play some suitably seasonal music, which they proceeded to do beautifully.
Here’s some video of extracts from their programme:
The band was formed as the Murton Gospel Temperance Blue Ribbon Army Band in 1884, and players were requested to wear a blue ribbon on the second button of their waistcoats. They became Murton Colliery band in 1895. When the colliery closed, the band became self-supporting — and it still is today. They’re also one of the few remaining bands to continue to call itself a ‘Colliery Band’, and they still proudly march through the village during the Durham Miners Gala and Armistice Day. I don’t know about you, but brass band music and Christmas do seem to go together rather well.
There was time for a good wander around and trips on some of the trams — including a 1930s enclosed double-decker Blackpool tram, which is technically a little late for their re-creations but very impressive — and I had some good chats with the tramway staff, noticing that they wore the archetypal “wheel and magnet” emblem of British Electric Traction (later to become the parent, surprisingly, of Rediffusion Television) on their caps. The shop at Beamish should sell those cap badges — I would have bought at least one.
Finally it was time to head off on the 3+ hour home, and soon after getting back on the A1 the fog closed in, and it ended up taking a good deal longer than that. But it was a great day out.
