Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings is an open-air museum of rescued buildings which have been relocated to its site in Stoke Heath, a district of Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England. Founded in 1963 and opened in 1967, the museum was conceived following the dismantling of a 15th-century timber-framed house in Bromsgrove in 1962 to provide a location for its reconstruction. It became England's first open-air museum and the second in the United Kingdom. This building is known as the 'Merchant's House' today, though it has been known by other names in the past, including the 'Bromsgrove House' and the 'Tudor House'. It now houses a collection of domestic, industrial, agricultural and other forms of historic building, the majority dismantled and re-erected.
The museum's collection comprises more than 27 buildings and structures which have been relocated from their original sites under threat of demolition, being rebuilt and restored at the museum. This includes a fully functioning windmill and a post WW2 prefab house as used in many towns and cities after the Second World War to provide quick affordable replacements for houses destroyed by bombing. The Arcon V prefabricated house was originally constructed on Moat Lane in Yardley, Birmingham and was transported to the museum in 1981.
Weddings and receptions are frequently held in The New Guesten Hall, a building at the museum which was built to incorporate the preserved timber roof of Guesten Hall, originally built next to Worcester Cathedral for entertaining the Prior's guests. The New Guesten Hall is also used by outside parties for concerts, conferences, exhibitions and meetings. The museum's Victorian church, originally built in 1891 at Bringsty Common, Herefordshire, was opened and re-dedicated in 1996 and services are held there during the museum's open season. The church is also licensed for wedding blessings.
The other exhibits, which span over 700 years of history, include a perry mill from Redditch, a toll house from Little Malvern, a fibreglass spire from Smethwick, an earth closet, a cruck-frame barn and a counting house.
Read more about Avoncroft Museum Of Historic Buildings: Exhibits, Events, Gallery
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“Always clung to by barnacles.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 2661, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)
“We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in “the social” our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial cosiness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)