Welcome to Beamish

A community that is and never was

By Marilyn Loeser

Beamish is located in Northeast England, just north of Durham. The open air museum, set in more than 300 acres of beautiful countryside, vividly recreates life in the North of England in the early 1800s and 1900s.

Winner of both the British Museum of the Year and European Museum of the Year awards, Beamish is an educational and entertaining destination for anyone interested in learning and experiencing English history.

For example, when was the last time you ventured into a drift mine? But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I was visiting my friends Bryan and Michelle O’Donoghue, and their children Lydia and Bradley, in Hartlepool — a city on the North Sea.

While planning my visit I read in a North East England Tourist Information brochure about the museum and my friends heartily agreed Beamish was a wonderful destination.

The lay of the land

Once past the entrance building, we walked across the road that circles the property and into a wooded area. Just ahead, horses grazed in plank fence-lined fields and smoke curled from cottage chimneys as we walked toward the Colliery Village.

Here we would explore pit cottages and gardens, a Methodist Chapel and board school before heading toward the mines. Mining was once the life blood of this area. The village buildings — and most of the other buildings and their contents — are period relics and antiques, moved here and arranged on a grand scale to allow visitors a chance to walk back into another time and experience it as close to its yesteryear reality as possible.

The Colliery Village represents the people who worked and lived in and around the coal mines of 1913. Touring Beamish, your experiences fluctuate between this year and a century earlier — 1825 — depending on the history being portrayed.

Next we visited the mines.

School children put on red hard hats and posed for a photo before disappearing into the large dark hole in the side of a hill. “This is a drift mine,” said a gentleman organizing his next pit-crew. “This mine was dug horizontally into the hill. The mine over there,” he gestured with a nod of his head “takes miners vertically into the mine.”

We followed him into the darkness as his narrative continued. “I was a miner for 27 years,” he said. “My father mined for more than 50 years.”

He explained what it was like to work in the mine and what would happen if a man could no longer do his job. “His family was evicted from their cottage and left with no way to support themselves.”

Like all areas of Beamish, if your interest is mining and its history, you could spend hours in this area. But for guests wanting to see the entire museum, trams circle the property, dropping guests off at different stops along its path.

Established in 1970 and administered by a Joint Committee representing North Eastern City, County and District Councils, Beamish was established as “an Open Air Museum for the purpose of studying, collecting, preserving, interpreting and exhibiting buildings, machinery, objects and information illustrating the development of industry and agriculture and way of life in the North of England."

The Spirit of Beamish

Next we were headed for 1825 when the region was rural and thinly populated. It was the industrial revolution and railways that accelerated change. By 1913, the region's heavy industries, including mining, were at their peak.

Most of the houses, shops and other buildings were "deconstructed" from elsewhere in the region and rebuilt here. The Drift Mine, Home Farm and Pockerley Manor were already here.

In addition to its authenticity, you won’t find glass cases here. Costumed interpreters go about their day as if they were living in the time they are helping represent, but also answer guests’ questions.

From the Colliery Village, we walked through a pine forest and up a slight grade to the area known as the 1825 Pockerley Manor House.

There have been people living at Pockerley for more than 1,000 years we’re told as we walk from room to room and watch as a young woman cooks over an open fire.

Today, Pockerley consists of a small manor house and horse yard, but was once an ancient defensive site. The house, gardens and farm buildings are shown as they were in the 1820s when a yeoman landowner, along with his family, servants and laborers ran the surrounding estate.

A second house, know as The Old House, was a wing of an earlier manor. The

Pockerley Manor Gardens completes the site with formal gardens, cultivated vegetable plots and orchards.

The Town

We boarded one of the trams, a copy of a double-deck bus owned by Gateshead Tramways in 1913, and headed toward The Town.

Shops are arranged like a typical market town of the early 1900s and include co-operative shops, a confectionery, dentist's home and surgery, a bank, pub and solicitor's office.

We decided to have lunch at Dainty Dinah Tea Rooms in The Town before continuing our tour. The scale of Beamish is unlike any museum I’ve ever visited. The term open-air is in reference to the lack of exhibits, but rather artifacts and antiques relevant to the time period are displayed as they would have been during the time they are representing as if the men and women of this time could walk into any home or store and touch, purchase or use any item displayed.

Just beyond The Town is the train station complete with a young woman seated on a wooden bench demurely reading a book as she seemingly waits for the train.

An 1822 locomotive, built by George Stephenson, and reputedly the third oldest surviving railway engine in the world, is the centerpiece of a period Running Shed near the train station.

Home Farm

The last stop on our tour is the Home Farm, originally an estate farm, managed by the landowner's bailiff, and used to show good farming practice. Here, visitors can learn about life on an early 1900s family farm and how the farmer's wife spent her busy day in the large farmhouse kitchen.

Farm animals, popular in the period, call the farm home — Shorthorn cattle, Saddleback pigs, Teeswater Sheep and farmyard poultry.

Back at the Entrance Building, we walked back into the 21st-century — the end of our day away into another time.

If you go:

Beamish is open all year.

During the summer, the entire museum is open for exploration. A winter visit is centered on The Town and tramway only; prices are reduced during the winder months.

In addition to Dainty Dinah Tea Rooms in The Town, The Sun Inn Public House
and The Coffee Shop are open for light meals and beverages in The Town.

Refreshments also are available in the Entrance Building and at the Home Farm.

Beamish is located in County Durham, about 12 miles north west of Durham City and 8 miles south west of Newcastle upon Tyne.

For more information:
Beamish: http://www.beamish.org.uk/visitor-contact.html.
Hartlepool: http://www.destinationhartlepool.com
England’s North Country: http://www.enjoyenglandnorthcountry.com.

Accommodations:
The York Hotel: http://www.theyorkhotel.co.uk
The Grand Hotel: www.grandhotelhartlepool.co.uk

Traveling by train: http://www.britrail.net
The closest main-line station is Newcastle upon Tyne, with buses operating from the city center to Beamish. The BritRail website highlights maps and special price-saving passes. Passes are the most convenient — one ticket is good on more than 18,000 daily train departures in England, Scotland and Wales — and economical because they can be purchased for different increments of time.