1 September 2016 - The Croft Campsite, Warden Law, Houghton-le-Spring, Tyne & Wear

The first day of September dawned clear and cold; the very best kind of autumn day. We spent the greater part of the morning ringing around trying to find space in camping grounds for the two weeks beyond this. A social call to Chris’s sister revealed that this is the very busiest time of the year for camping; school holidays are not completely over and the population spend the last week or two in some sort of frenzy attempting to catch the last of the “summer”. This would have explained why we have ended up booked into our next camp further down the east coast for a rip-off tariff of £27 a night.

Queuing in the sunshine

Although simmering a little from the injustice of the world, we eventually headed off to the Beamish: Living Museum of the North for the day. On the face of it, this seemed as if it would be a repeat of the Black Country Museum we went to in Dudley just out of Birmingham. Chris was keen to go even after checking out the charge, so I was happy to tag along.

We arrived an hour after opening time, and the car parks were already packed, although a young chap on marshalling duty soon directed us to a convenient spot. We joined the queues of families and other folk waiting to buy entry tickets; the only comparable queue I have ever experienced would be that to see the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London. Three quarters of an hour after parking, we were finally processed through the entrance. All credit to Chris; his complaints were only audible to those immediately next to us, less than expected and he was pleasantly surprised with the OAP entry price of £13.50 each.

Pockerley Old Hall

Initially I was disappointed that there was so little explanation of the history and scenes before us, however I later understood that this would have spoiled the experience. The museum is spread out over more than three hundred acres about 11 miles west of our camp, in a gentle basin of land easily accessed from the A693. Despite earlier research, I could not help thinking that we were wandering about villages and farms that had been here for many many centuries, the past occupants having been sent off on an impromptu holiday, as if they had quickly tidied up before heading away but would otherwise be soon back to pick up their lives, so authentic are the properties on display.

Farmyard scenes at Home Farm

In reality, as with the Black Country museum, the buildings have been painstakingly taken apart, block by block, brick by brick, bolt by bolt, then moved onto their new home, and re-assembled in exact fashion over several sections, depicting different time zones. There is the 1940s farm which today was peopled by land-army women and the home guard, the 1900s pit village and colliery adjacent to a mine entrance of a real former coal mine, a 1900s town and an Edwardian farm, the Pockerley Old Hall and the Pockerley Waggonway, all linked by restored trams and buses. 

The museum has about four hundred paid employees and about three hundred and fifty volunteers, most wearing period costume to go about their work. We fell into conversation with a guide in the Masonic Hall and ended up spending quite some time listening to the history of the museum and the exhibits, this explaining the lack of interpretative signage. Without this signage, one is easily lulled into the illusion of being in an authentic environment rather than a staged history, apart from the fact the voyeurs are clad in a fashion that would have been entirely unacceptable in the day. We were also moved to buy a guide book which repeated much of what she had told us and more.

View of the mining village

We wandered through the town, in and out of the many shops and houses, then bought ice-creams at a stall. Here only snacks available in the 1900 were for sale. Our ice-creams were dipped in fairy sprinkles or hundreds and thousands, and tasted less creamy than modern glutinous commercial products. Actually I was reminded of the ice-cream my mother used to make in freezer trays when we were children. Eating these interesting concoctions, we wandered down past the fairground, where the merry-go-round turned by steam power.

Frank Atkinson is the hero of this story. He was the son of a labourer and a teacher, born in 1924. He worked his way into curatorship of museums at a young age, and then after travelling through Scandinavia in the 1950s where he visited folk museums, dreamed of setting up an open air museum for the North East. He realised that the region was changing dramatically and industries such as coal mining, shipbuilding and iron and steel manufacturing were disappearing, along with the communities that served them. Concerned that the region was losing its identity and “customs, traditions and ways of speech” were dying out, Frank said it was essential that collecting be carried out quickly and on as big a scale as possible.”.

Rowley Station

In 1970, he took up his fulltime position at Beamish Hall, now a hotel outside this complex, and along with three others, commenced his grand project. One year later the first introductory exhibition was opened. The various stages opened one by one over the years, the Rowley Station in 1976, the Mahogany drift mine in 1979, Home Farm in 1983 and the Co-op one year later. A 1950s village populated with Airey houses, those like Chris started his life in, is due to be completed in a couple of years’ time.

The two areas of the museum that have been restored from actual existence are the mine and Pockerely Old Hall. The latter has existed since at least 1183, and was occupied by a tenant farmer until 1990, when the hall became part of the museum. The farmhouse is thought to date back to the late 1700s and is truly a delight to visit, with every nook and cranny open to view, unlike most of the National Trust and English Heritage properties which have roped off or locked rooms still hiding secrets.

The Colliery

The Mahogany Drift was opened on the site in about 1855, later closing before reopening again in 1921. When it did finally close for good in the 1950s, the pithead was slapped with a preservation order, so when the museum wanted to move it down to the museum, they had to have the order removed, then reinstated again after it was re-established on the new site for posterity. Such bureaucracy! 

I am sure that you will have gathered by now that I was very impressed with the museum, and was prepared to eat my earlier words. We spent about four and a half hours walking about enjoying the space, on top of the time we had spent in the sun queuing to come in, leaving only when rain threatened. Beamish Museum is to be highly recommended and in our opinion, superior to that in Dudley, or at the very least, as good.