Exhibits
The buildings and structures at the museum were all moved there to save them from demolition they would have faced in their previous locations, either through wilful destruction or neglect. Together, they represent over 700 years of history from the Midlands and a little further beyond.
The Merchant House, The Windmill and The Granary were dismantled, restored and fully reconstructed by Gunolt Daniel Greiner (born 1915 in Jugenheim) and his son Benedict Francis Greiner. These were the only ones restored by him in Avoncroft. They then also dismantled, restored and fully reconstructed other 15th century buildings on various open air museums sites in England for example The Bayleaf house and Market Guild Hall at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum www.wealddown.co.uk near Chichester. Gunolt always kept to the original style of the buildings and when the original format was unknown he would put a simple plain unembelished section. An example of this is a plain oak block stairway (demonstrated in The Merchant House).
The buildings include industrial buildings (for example the chain shop), residential / domestic buildings (for example the prefab and toll house), religious buildings (such as the church), agricultural buildings (such as the windmill, barn and stable), buildings for entertainment (such as the cockpit) and others that don't fit these categories (such as the cell block, earth closet and ice house).
Some of the buildings are furnished interally to present a view of life in a particular era in that building. Others are empty, or contain other display materials.
The museum also has a small objects collection which support the large objects collection. Some of these are displayed in the buildings, whilst the rest are kept in the museum store.
The museum also contains the UK National Collection of telephone kiosks. This is the largest collection of telephone kiosks in the country and is part of BT's Connected Earth heritage project. There are also three fully working analogue telephone exchanges (one of them a mobile TXE2), a manual switchboard and early automatic systems. The collection shows the complete history of telephone kiosks in the UK from 1912 to the 1990s together with demonstrations of how telephone calls were routed and connected before the advent of digital technology.
Read more about this topic: Avoncroft Museum Of Historic Buildings
Famous quotes containing the word exhibits:
“Every woman who visited the Fair made it the center of her orbit. Here was a structure designed by a woman, decorated by women, managed by women, filled with the work of women. Thousands discovered women were not only doing something, but had been working seriously for many generations ... [ellipsis in source] Many of the exhibits were admirable, but if others failed to satisfy experts, what of it?”
—Kate Field (1838–1908)
“Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“After all the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)