Latest news with #livingmuseum
BBC News
27-06-2025
- BBC News
Replica Spanish galleon arrives on Yorkshire coast
A replica of a 16th Century Spanish galleon has sailed into port on the Yorkshire coast and will welcome visitors for the next two original Nao Victoria became the first ship to circumnavigate the globe more than 500 years ago, and the replica now operates as a living museum. Lupo Bathke, logistics manager for the vessel, said the crew were "constantly reminded of what an amazing piece of history we get to live on every day by people who come to visit".The ship is berthed at North Wharf Quay in Scarborough and will be open daily to the public from 27 June to 6 July. After tide times delayed the ship's arrival, its mast and Spanish flag were eventually visible on the outside of the harbour wall, to the delight of a gathered crowd. Lisa, from Whitby, said she'd been waiting since the morning to spot the Nao Victoria, and described it as looking "like a pirate ship"."I'm very excited to see it - it's gorgeous, absolutely stunning. I'm actually going on it tomorrow," she Julie and Andy, from Shipley, the sight of the galleon was a pleasant surprise. "We just got set up here because we like looking at the boats, and then we heard people talking and it's just a coincidence this boat is coming in," Julie said."We've got the perfect position, sat comfortably - brilliant." The Nao Victoria - whose name translates as "Victory" - was the only one of five ships that returned from a voyage to Indonesia, but later sank in 1570. The replica was completed in 1991 and made a round-the-world trip between 2004 - 2006 in homage to the one taken by the to Mr Bathke, the vessel travels "80% of the time under sail" but has two auxiliary engines which are mainly used for navigating in and out of previously spent a year on board with the crew and called it a "once-in-a-lifetime experience" that even poor weather couldn't spoil."When it gets into heavy waves, it can be a lot of fun for those who enjoy it and very never-wracking if you don't enjoy it that much," he said."I'm lucky enough to have never been seasick so I thoroughly enjoy it but I have seen some people who don't have that good a time." The Nao Victoria now only stops sailing for one month a year, and mainly travels around northern Europe. Prior to arriving in Scarborough, the ship journeyed up the English coast, stopping at Torquay and Eastbourne. Visitors will be able to board the Nao Victoria between 10:00 – 20:00 BST every day, to find out more about the history of the original vessel. Listen to highlights from North Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
Telegraph
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
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.
The Sun
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Quaint UK town hiding ‘Disney for history buffs' attraction that's loved by Countryfile star
AN unusual attraction that is a "Disney for history lovers" has been raved about by a Countryfile star. Matt Baker, currently appearing in Matt Baker's British Isles, has confessed that he's a huge fan of the 'living museum of the North'. 5 5 When Sun Travel asked Matt Baker where he'd recommend anyone to visit on a trip to Durham, he simply answered "Beamish". He continued: "It's the best open air museum in the world, without question. "Basically what they do is take down buildings in the North East and put them back up at Beamish, and go around on all old trams, there's old villages, farms - you can even stay there now and have a historic stay over at Beamish. "It's amazing, it's basically the North East through the ages and you can spend days there." Beamish is a world famous open air museum in the town of Stanely and the first of its kind to open in the region. It brings the history of North East England to life. You can have a Georgian experience at Pockerly Old Hall or see how families lived and worked in the years leading up to the First World War in the 1900s. One of the recent installations was Spain's Field Farm which stood for centuries in Eastgate near Weardale in Durham. It was then dismantled and transported to the museum, where it was been carefully rebuilt to show 1950s life on the region's upland farms. In 2024 Beamish opened a new 1950s town, which includes a toy shop, welfare hall and a cinema that had been taken from Ryhope in Sunderland and rebuilt. There's also a pub, a school, a dentist among its businesses and you can ride on the trams and buses, and explore the railway station too. Matt Baker Explores the British Isles 5 Matt added: "There's loads of exhibitions and shops, you can have coal-fired fish and chips, it's the most brilliant day out." "It's like Disney World for history buffs - that's the only way I can describe it. You get transported back in time, it's a proper immersive experience." You can even see Matt on a trip to the living museum if you catch up on one of his previous shows. He told us: "I did a series called 'Travels with Mum & Dad' and we went all over the North East, so if you are fascinated and want to find out more watch that because we went to Beamish." 5 Tickets to the open air museum are unlimited passes so once you've been once, you can visit for the whole year including daytime events. Adult tickets cost £33, senior and student tickets cost £25, children between 5-16 are £20. As for other places to explore around his stomping ground, Matt recommended Durham Cathedral and the High Force waterfall in Teesdale. He also suggested taking a walk in the Durham Dales and strolling along the coastline. Currently the Countryfile star is on an adventure through the British Isles showing off what the UK has to offer. He's found beautiful beaches on the Northern Irish coastline and discovered tasty sparkling wine at a Champagne-worthy vineyard in Kent. Watch the final episode Matt Baker's British Isles on Tuesday 24, at 9pm on More4. Catch up on all previous episodes on This European city has the world's oldest living museum and £2 local beers. And this retro UK tourist 'town' is where Peaky Blinders was filmed and you can live a 1920s life.
