25-06-2025
Inside Beamish, the immersive museum bringing 1913 back to life
In the town print shop, the shopkeeper's inky fingers move fast as she turns the letterpress frame over and slots in a new section of type. Behind her hang rows of prints, pegged to a line to dry before being sold in a shop down the road. In this first-floor room, the air is suffused with the smell of burnt sugar from the sweet shop below, where women in white aprons are making cinder toffee in front of a gaggle of wide-eyed schoolchildren. Outside, a woman in a long skirt, straw hat and suffragette sash worn across her chest, stops to talk to a man in a suit and bowler hat as a tram clatters past.
I haven't quite stepped back in time, but I've come pretty close. This is the 1913 town at Beamish – the open-air, living museum in County Durham, where visitors can buy bread freshly made using a historic recipe in Herron's bakery, set their teeth tingling with a batch of cinder toffee from the sweet shop, have their portrait taken in JR & D Edis Photographers' studio, and enjoy a pint of local ale in The Sun Inn. Nominated as one of five shortlisted museums for Art Fund Museum of the Year 2025, the winner of which is announced tomorrow, it is far and away the most fun of the finalists. After all, where else can you hop straight from the Edwardian era into a 1950s cinema just by getting on a tram?
The whole of Beamish, which was founded by Frank Atkinson in the late Sixties, is like this. As well as the 1913 town, there is the Georgian Pockerley Hall, gardens and Drovers Tavern (where I enjoyed a Salmagundi salad – a Georgian-era recipe – for lunch); a 1900s pit village and colliery with a former working mine; farms from the Forties and Fifties with live animals and fecund vegetable patches; and, most recently, a 1950s town. This latest addition opened last year, complete with a milk bar where you can buy a milkshake, a cinema where you can watch a period film and a hairdresser where you can get your hair styled in the fashions of the time.
All the buildings are either faithful reproductions or have been transported, brick by brick, from their original locations – the listed bandstand in the park and the little row of pretty, brick-fronted houses opposite in the 1913 town were originally in Gateshead; the pub came from Bishop Auckland and the Co-Op stores from Annfield Plain, just up the road. The vast majority of the objects in each building, from the bolts of cloth and glass-fronted cases of collars and handkerchiefs in the drapers, to the candlesticks in the pit cottages, are originals from the period that have been donated. It's completely fascinating. As the museum's director, Rhiannon Hiles – who started volunteering here 25 years ago and is today dressed in Fifties garb – puts it, 'the power of an open-air museum is that immersive experience.'
I first visited Beamish when I was about eight, on a school trip in which I vaguely remember dressing up as a maid. Similar gaggles of schoolchildren throng the streets of the museum today, all of whom seem as charmed as I was back in the Eighties. Ask almost anyone in these parts if they've been to Beamish and their eyes will light up at the memory – the dressing up; the sweets; the jumping on a vintage bus or tram to trundle down the hill and up again. This is why Beamish is so beguiling: there are no boring wall displays of endless text to read here; no hand-wringing references to the evils of Britain's colonial past, or endless contextualising of history through a modern lens. There are no textual explanations at all, in fact, just a series of museum workers in period garb ready to tell you about the family who lived in this particular cottage, or take you through your ABCs in the early 1900s schoolroom, warmed by a proper coal-burning fire.
Interiors, too, are not hidden behind glass walls or velvet ropes ('I don't really like barrier ropes', says Hiles). Visitors can walk into and pick up and touch things: there are no absolutely priceless objects on display. The entire focus is on the mundane and everyday: on ordinary social history, however parochial it might seem. It's slightly twee, and sometimes mildly jarring, but it's utterly charming, far less exhausting than the standard exhibition experience and, crucially, for a modern museum, very accessible.
'The open museums which I love – and the ones where you see the greatest footfall – are the ones which have the context and mean something to ordinary people,' explains Hiles. 'When they come in, they can go. 'Oh, that looks like my Gran's kitchen used to.''
This democratisation of Britain's historical past – which has in recent years seen the likes of the National Trust and English Heritage see more interest in the below stairs history of their properties – is a model that appears to be serving Beamish well. Last year, it saw its highest number of visitors: 839,000, a number that has been growing steadily since it reopened its doors post-pandemic.
Hiles thinks this growth is partly due to the special place the museum holds in its visitors' hearts, many of whom were first brought here as small children, like I was, then return with their own children and grandchildren. 'People think of Beamish as theirs,' says Hiles. It helps that the price of admission (£33 for an adult; Beamish is independent and gets no government funding) lets you return as many times as you want for a year.
Of course, nothing can be entirely authentic and it's true that Beamish offers something of a sanitised version of history. There are none of the revolting smells that would have accompanied daily life in the early 20th Century; none of the dangers that lurked down dark alleys, and little of the sense of desperation and deprivation that would have haunted many everyday lives.
'I've had this conversation with people for many years about rose-tinted glasses,' admits Hiles – although she says that when you do truly try to recreate mess and filth and reality, 'visitors don't tend to go into the space'.
The one part of the museum that does evoke a strong sense of the harsh realities of an earlier age is the 1900s pit village. A short row of miners' cottages – cosy with their coal-fed fires, but tiny – would have been unbearably crowded when filled with the families who lived in them: one is set up as belonging to an Irish Catholic family (who really existed) and would have had 14 people living in it. In each of the cottages, the miner would have slept in the parlour – no family would have wanted to risk their livelihood by sending a man up and down the rickety ladder to the loft to sleep with all the trip hazards that entailed. Children would have gone, briefly, to the school, but aged about 14 would be sent down the pit.
You can even go down the pit yourself, and I did. It's uncomfortable within minutes: dark, damp, dripping and low-roofed – 4ft 6in at its highest, the legal height a mine had to be for the pit ponies who hauled out the coal (the tallest miner who worked in this particular drift mine was 6ft 7in, our guide informs us). Mining was filthy, exhausting, dangerous work: eight hours a day, six days a week chipping away at the seams with a pick and shovel, sometimes on your stomach in the heat and the dark. You'd only get paid for how much coal you dug and the majority of the time you'd be doing it in almost pitch darkness.
Emerging, blinking into the light and joints-aching, for a moment I get a sense of what life was like for communities like this back then. For all its tweeness and semi-sanitisation, Beamish has done its job. Perhaps I'll come back here with my own grandchildren one day.
The Museum of the Year award is announced on June 26;
Art Fund Museum of the Year: the other shortlistees
Chapter, Cardiff
This social space and cultural centre includes a gallery, artists' studios, theatres, cinemas, a cafe and community garden. It's known for showcasing independent and arthouse films, as well as supporting local artists.
Compton Verney, Warwickshire
A quintessential country house-and-garden combo, this Grade I-listed 18th-century mansion turned art gallery is set in 120 acres of Capability Brown parkland and features six art collections, a sculpture park and a cafe.
Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast
A spanking new (it reopened in the city centre last year) contemporary art gallery in the heart of Belfast, which has two large gallery spaces, a community participation and engagement hub, plus Northern Ireland's first visual art library and archive.
Perth Museum, Perth
This beautiful Edwardian building – once the City Hall, now a newly developed museum – has just had a £27 million redevelopment facelift, and houses the Stone of Destiny (aka the Stone of Scone), which was used during the coronation of Scottish monarchs and returned to Perthshire in 1996 following 700 years in Westminster Abbey.
