Living History - the past re-created in today's world
Black Country Living Museum
Engineering at the heart of the Industrial Revolution
The museum occupies a twenty six acre urban heritage park in the shadow of Dudley Castle in the centre of the Black Country conurbation of two million people.
Electric tramcars and trolleybuses transport visitors from the entrance in a recreated factory to the village area with thirty buildings situated by the canal basin. Coal mine displays include underground workings, colliery surface buildings and a replica of the 1712 Newcomen steam engine. In all forty two separate displays have either been re-erected or built to old plans to create a living open air museum
Newcomen Engine
In 1712, Thomas Newcomen built the first successful steam engine in the world, used for pumping water from coal mines on Lord Dudley's estates. In 1986, after more than ten years of painstaking research, the museum completed the construction of a full scale working replica of that 1712 engine
Historical Science still at work
In the Castlefields Ironworks many of the iron working processes of the area can be found.
The Nail Shop is a replica of one built about 1880 in Chapel Street, Halesowen, which was last worked by Sidney Telfer in the 1940s.
The Chain Shop was built using two hearths from one of the last firms in the area to make handmade chain, Bloomers of Quarry Bank, and a replica of one at Cruddas in Cradley Heath.
The Glasscutter's shop is behind the general store.
It is based upon one in Bridge Street in Wordsley, where many small glasscutting workshops were to be found in back gardens .
Submitted by: Peter Gallant, Blackcountry Setpoint, 15 April 2003
