Ironbridge Gorge Museums

Iron­bridge, near Telford in Shrop­shire, is rightly regarded as one of the foun­da­tions of the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion. Here in 1707, Abra­ham Darby per­fected (and patented) a method of smelt­ing iron ore using coke.

Pre­vi­ously, the process required char­coal, which takes a great deal of time and effort to pro­duce, first grow­ing the trees (!), then burn­ing the wood under the right con­di­tions. As a result, the amount of iron that could be smelted was lim­ited by the sup­ply of char­coal. The dis­cov­ery of a means of using coke – which is derived from coal – meant that iron could be pro­duced as quickly as the coal could be mined. This enabled the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion to take off.

In 1779 the great Iron Bridge across the Sev­ern, after which the town is named, was built by Abra­ham Darby III. It was the first cast-iron bridge in the world.

Today, the indus­try that char­ac­terised the area for hun­dreds of years is largely silent, but in its place is a col­lec­tion of nearly a dozen dif­fer­ent muse­ums and attrac­tions that help us to under­stand our indus­trial her­itage. You can find out more about them here. In 1986 the Gorge was one of the first seven UK sites awarded World Her­itage Site sta­tus by UNESCO.

To see all the major loca­tions will take you more than a day, par­tic­u­larly as a result of the exten­sive­ness of Blists Hill Vic­to­rian Town. How­ever, I sug­gest you start at the Museum of the Gorge, which boasts one of the most detailed dio­ra­mas I’ve ever seen, in this case of the stretch of the Sev­ern and the enor­mous col­lec­tion of indus­trial activ­i­ties car­ried out here from mediæ­val times onwards.

In addi­tion, you might like to take in the Coal­brook­dale Museum of Iron. How­ever the most exten­sive loca­tion to visit in the area is Blists Hill Vic­to­rian Town. Based around the site of an old brick works, the town con­sists of build­ings either restored, relo­cated or spe­cially built fol­low­ing detailed research.

You enter the town via a very impres­sive (and recent) audio­vi­sual pre­sen­ta­tion which high­lights the region’s indus­trial her­itage, and then you’re on the main street, where the first build­ing is a Lloyds Bank. Here you can exchange mod­ern money for tra­di­tional pre-1971 £.s.d. that you can use to buy items in the shops on the site (they also take mod­ern money, unlike the Ken­twell Hall’s Tudor re-enactments, where beyond the “time tun­nel”, all trans­ac­tions have to be done with the tra­di­tional coinage).

There are work­ing steam engines, includ­ing one used to raise and lower a mine cage and a replica of Richard Trevithick’s 1802 Pen-y-Darren loco­mo­tive. There are a cou­ple of very impres­sive beam engines orig­i­nally used to blow air into blast fur­naces, but regret­tably these will never steam again and are demon­strated by dri­ving with an elec­tric motor.

Cos­tumed staff are on hand to describe the busi­nesses, shops and indus­try of the Vic­to­rian era and I was very tempted to turn up in cos­tume – though I was not sure how they would react. Some places love you to do that, while oth­ers (notably Ken­twell) abhor it, as you might be mis­taken for staff and, not know­ing the back-story, might let them down (at Ken­twell the back-story is so detailed that this is a real pos­si­bil­ity). Beamish, I seem to recall, lets you turn up in cos­tume and they give you a spe­cial tag (suit­ably printed in let­ter­press fonts of the period, pre­sum­ably in their print shop) to indi­cate that you’re a “Visitor”.

Indeed, the obvi­ous com­par­i­son with Blists Hill is Beamish, and there is appar­ently a lit­tle rivalry between the two sites, it was hinted, but in fact the two, while there is some obvi­ous over­lap, have some sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences – the money at Blists Hill and the trams at Beamish for exam­ple. At Blists Hill, you get around on foot or by horse-drawn wagon.

Blists Hill has a wide selec­tion of shops, some­times pro­duc­ing and sell­ing items; there are also some per­for­mances by a pair of actors who present hilar­i­ous excerpts from Shake­speare (with the help of the audi­ence) and there are music-hall songs in the pub from time to time.

I did not take a great deal of video, but here is one extract. Down the bot­tom of the town there’s a Vic­to­rian fun­fair, includ­ing a merry-go-round, which orig­i­nally, one pre­sumes, would have been dri­ven by a steam trac­tion engine. There’s a nice lit­tle Pell organ on this one, play­ing var­i­ous med­leys of tunes of the era, of which you can hear a sam­ple below.

Blists Hill Fair­ground Organ from Richard Elen on Vimeo.