This museum has been named England's best

Telegraph

15-06-2025

A cynic might suggest that, far from being a brief moment in the calendar, 'awards season' never ends. If it is not the film industry doling out statuettes, then it is time for sporting tributes, art accolades, or the shiny gongs that draw pop stars to black-tie events.
So it should be no surprise that the travel world has been wearing its fanciest outfits in the last few days – via the Visit England Awards for Excellence. As the name suggests, this yearly ceremony beams a light onto this country's big achievers in the tourism sector.
The winners' list offered hat-tips to everything from major sites like the Royal Crescent in Bath and the National Space Centre in Leicester to self-catering cottages in Cornwall, country pubs in Derbyshire and Devon – and the Ad Gefrin distillery in Northumberland.
Yet tucked among these many plaudits was a triumph that some might argue was overdue. The winner in the 'Large Visitor Attraction of the Year' category was the Black Country Living Museum (BCLM); an institution that can hardly be described as 'new' – but which has long done splendid work as a treasure trove of British heritage.
It arrived on the map in 1978, but its remit looks back even further, into the mists of the 19th century. Technically, the Black Country Living Museum covers a 300-year chunk of history, but its focus is mainly on the window of time between 1850 and 1950, when the Industrial Revolution had prompted a period of almost unprecedented productivity, sweat and toil in this corner of the West Midlands.
There is no precise geographical definition of 'the Black Country', but its boundaries are generally deemed to encompass Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton (while stopping just short of Birmingham). Academic opinion varies on whether its moniker refers to the rich coal seam that was mined in the area, or the high levels of soot that haunted its air (and with it, its residents' faces) in the 19th century – but the connection to heavy industry is implicit.
The museum in Dudley digs into the epoch almost as effectively as colliers' pickaxes once clawed at the prized materials buried in the ground. Unlike many of Britain's industrial landmarks, which have been refurbished to a 'higher' purpose – the one-time Bankside and Battersea Power Stations in London, reinvented as Tate Modern and a retail and restaurant complex, respectively; the former Baltic Flour Mill in Gateshead, now repurposed as a contemporary art gallery – the BCLM revels in the dirt underneath its fingernails. An impressive 26 acres in scope, it makes use of a site which incorporates many of the essential elements of Britain's industrial era – a railway goods yard, coal pits, lime kilns, a section of the Dudley Canal.
Although many of the buildings have been transposed to the site, they have been brought in – and in many cases, spared from demolition – from the surrounding area. Thus there is an 1860s brass foundry from Walsall, an 1880s nail forge from Halesowen, and a 1920s rolling mill from Oldbury. All of them contribute to a pleasing clamour and clang. Visitors can watch links being fired at a chainmaker's smithy, or take a narrowboat ride into the (somewhat claustrophobic) confines of the Dudley Tunnel. And there are stores which remember a more innocent everyday commerce: a turn-of-the-century sweet shop, a Victorian pharmacy, a gentlemen's outfitters preserved as it would have looked in 1935.
There are trams and trolleybuses too, and a collection of cars – from makers as lost to view as Sunbeam, Clyno, AJS and Star – that drove these streets in the 1910s and 1920s.
If all this sounds like a dreary vision from a particularly rainy school trip, then, as a relatively biased witness – I grew up in the area – I can happily vouch for the BCLM as an entirely welcome alternative to a day in a 1980s classroom. It seems to have retained its charm in the 21st century too. When I took my primary-school-aged son to visit it a few summers ago, he spent most of a sunny afternoon learning to hoop-roll down one of the site's steeper cobbled lanes. Simple pleasures and all that.
There is one element of newness to a museum whose whole ethos is its avowed refusal to keep up with the times – the recent £30million redevelopment that has stretched its reference points into the living memory of the 1960s, with all the music, burgeoning technology and rapidly changing fashions that such time-travel entails. This 'update' is one of the reasons for the BCLM's success at the Visit England Awards – although would-be day-trippers can be assured that the museum remains defiantly stuck in the past.