If you are looking for great way to experience England’s history and see a bit of the past brought back to life, an open air or living history museum is a good place to start. Offering buildings to explore, costumed characters to talk to and even items to handle, open air museums are a tangible way of getting in touch with the past and experiencing a bit of what England might have once been like.
What is an Open Air Museum?
An open air museum is a very different experience to visiting a traditional museum. Where an indoor museum usually exhibits objects with labels in glass cases, open air museums instead have recreated historical environments where objects are shown being used in the settings and contexts that they would have been originally used in (hence “living history”).
These environments are often domestic, but also include workshops with craftsmen (appropriate to the region or period being exhibited, such as glass-blowing workshops, blacksmiths, printers or carpenters) and other familiar settings such as schools, farms and shops. There is a tendency for these museums to recreate a more rural lifestyle, but urban settings can also be found – The Living Museum of the North at Beamish provides a town area with a bank, professional offices and train station, for example, while Blists Hill Victorian Town offers a range of shops such a butchers, sweet shop and chemist.
Open Air Museum History
The open air museum (also known as outdoor museums, living history museums, Skansens or folk museums) originated in Scandinavia in the late 19th century as a means of preserving vanishing ways of life in the face of the rapid and sweeping changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution.
The founder of this movement was Artur Hazelius, a Stockholm scholar and folklorist. Concerned by the rapid loss of traditional ways of life that he saw happening in Sweden, Hazelius became determined to collect the furnishings, tools, costume, paintings and everyday objects of the past before they disappeared from use forever, and in 1873 used what he could find to open his Scandinavian Museum of Folklore (later called Nordiska Museet, “The Nordic Museum”).
Hazelius’ idea proved to be very popular, and soon inspired other Scandinavian equivalents in Norway and Denmark. The idea of the open air museum has since gradually spread around the world, but it took some time to become established in England. Over the past 40 years, however, the idea has really taken off, with a range of open air exhibits all around the country proving to be enduring attractions for tourists and those with a love of history alike.
The most prominent examples of open air museums in England now are Beamish, The Living Museum of the North in County Durham (opened in 1970), Blists Hill Victorian Town in Ironbridge Gorge, Shropshire (1973) and the Black County Living Museum near Birmingham (1975), although there are many other smaller museums demonstrating living history in some form to visitors all over England (such as the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in Sussex). As a testament to their popularity, the Black Country Living Museum alone welcomes around 250,000 visitors each year.
Why Are Open Air Museums Important?
The open-air museum doesn’t just save crafts, tools and furnishings that are in danger of being lost forever – they frequently save whole buildings as well. At Beamish, for example, the towns and village that look like they have been in situ since they were built were originally individual buildings spread all over the North East of England.
Each time a building became part of the museum it was meticulously recorded and researched in its original location, before the masonry, lintels and important architectural features were numbered, and the building carefully dismantled. The materials were then brought to the museum and rebuilt like a giant jigsaw puzzle, saving the historic structure if not the original context. Those buildings that warranted such special treatment needed to be typical of the region, capable of being dismantled and removed and something that would fit in with the rest of the museum, and many pieces of England’s history have been saved using this painstaking process.
Open air museums attempt to recreate what we might think of as the ordinary, everyday life experienced by a majority of people in the past rather than the upper class lifestyles or unusual objects that frequently appear in museums and other heritage settings such as country houses. The buildings likewise feature vernacular architecture and the collections are often very localised in nature.
In this setting the demonstrators or interpreters – more often than not dressed in period costume – act like they are the museum labels, giving talks to visitors and answering questions. In some museums the interpreters act the part of people in the past, while in others they are more like information points, answering questions in the third person. Demonstrations, ranging from domestic tasks such as blacking the range and baking bread to specialist displays presented by skilled craftsmen (like the working foundry at Blists Hill Victorian Town) are also often available in these museums.
As historian Edward Alexander has noted, "the outdoor museum was...more than combining the pleasant atmosphere of the picnic with the serious museum visit. Its most important contribution was the conception of greatness of a country...have firm roots in that country's own history."
Additional Sources
Alexander, E.P. (1996). Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums. London: Sage.
Sharon Brookshaw - Freelance writer, university research administrator and PhD in archaeology/museum studies.
