I'm a living history nut. Most likely stems from my years in a bodice and skirts as PR with the original Renaissance Pleasure Faire here in California, extending nowadays to an absolute insistence on dragging my nearest and dearest into any promising recreation of ordinary folks' lives lived in days gone by.
After a slight session in gentle persuasion and still somewhat to my surprise, the whole gang of extended family staying with us in beautiful County Durham this summer, agreed to step back in time with me for a visit to Beamish - the large scale, complete pit-village living history Museum of the North of England.
Touted by the Sunday Times as one of the 12 world's coolest museums, Beamish has a reputation throughout Britain for a thoroughly captivating day out. From toddlers, to ancient, blanket-clad grannies in wheel chairs, teens, school parties and history lovers from around the world, 300 acre Beamish brings Northern England's Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian past vividly to life.
Located eight miles west of Newscastle upon Tyne and 12 miles north west of the cathedral city of Durham, Beamish wasn't too swamped with summer crowds during our weekday visit. One of the benefits of traveling to the UK or elsewhere in Europe in June and early July is that school summer sessions don't coincide, making for more private-like tours of popular and historical sites.
With tots in tow we hopped on and off vintage trams and open top buses for a delightfully engrossing exploration (including a hard hat, back-bent expedition down into the original pit face) of Pit Village, with its row of miners cottages, school, church and colliery, around the great meadows into the immaculately recreated Edwardian town (with pub, sweet shop, bank, dentists and more),further into the countryside for a stroll through original Home Farm, preserved as a working farm today in its traditional mode complete with heritage livestock and bustling farmhouse kitchen.
We'd spent so much time chatting to authentically dressed teachers, miners, shop keepers and engine drivers that our day whizzed by without enough time to make any headway in the direction of Pockerley Old Hall and waggonway with its promise of a stunning, orginal Georgian manor house and railway with a working replica of the famous "Puffing Billy" that caused all the locomotion commotion during that explosive industrial era.
One of the things that sticks in my mind most was a lengthy chat with a lovely young dental assistant in town, who told us how the majority of middle class Brits in the day would opt for full extraction of their teeth if income allowed, prefering a set of dentures to the perils of on going dentistry through life. Young women were, she said, deemed far more eligible if their parents had paid for their teeth to be pulled prior to marriage, saving a hubby-to-be a pretty penny in years to come. A vision of a blushing bride of yesteryear, flashing a smile of brand new Georgian dentures at the church gate was a bit of a shocker to say the least. "Ask a really old person with dentures if they'd opted for full extraction and they'll most often tell you they did," she said.
School rooms with their small wooden desks and chalk board and thick paper posters of the British Victorian empire reminded me of the classroom of my primary school days. I don't think all that much changed too dramatically in that environment until technological advances of the past decade or so. We did learn that frequent corporal punishment was not the norm in the British classroom until after World War I when soliders returned from the front line having witnessed such incredible violence and atrocity that it filtered into discliplinary practice in society in general.
Pit life was perilous, as we know. Often up to 12 family members would share the upstairs bedroom of a tiny pit cottage where the mother would be on call practically 24 hours a day to serve up hot meals and warm baths. Fathers and sons would not be put onto same shifts for the real fear of pits collapsing and explosions occuring underground. If the miner of the family died, the entire clan would have to be out of their cottage in days. Multiple sons down the pit made for a more secure home life.
Life revolved around the kitchen and Beamish villagers cook and sew and weave day in day out, tending cottage gardens of fresh veggies and fruit and forging a vital link from how we were.
Many of the buildings at Beamish have been painstakingly recreated from moving brick and mortar and contents from their historic original locations elsewhere in the country. With such a huge site, numerous additional buildings of interest are in the pipeline for being saved and salvaged and brought back to life at Beamish where seasonal attractions include Spring lambing, the Great North Steam Fair, a Georgian Fair, Agricultural Show, Halloween events and traditional Christmas experiences.
If you go: Plan on a whole day to explore so as not to miss any of the environments. Beamish is signposted from the A1 (M), J63, A68 and A693. Buses run from Chester-le-Street, Durham, Newcastle and Gateshead and trains from Chester-le-Street or Newcastle upon Tyne. Telephone UK 0871 200 4950.
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