Beamish Museum - History

History

Beamish is the first English museum to be financed and administered by a consortium of County Councils (Cleveland, Durham, Northumberland and Tyne and Wear) and it was the first regional open-air museum in England. The museum was first proposed in 1958 and the collections were established on the Beamish site in 1970 under director Frank Atkinson (b. 1924). Atkinson, realising that the region's traditional industries of coal-mining, shipbuilding, and iron and steel manufacture were disappearing along with the communities that served them, was anxious to preserve the customs, traditions and ways of speech of the region. He said, "It is essential that collecting be carried out quickly and on as big a scale as possible. It is now almost too late."

Atkinson adopted a policy of "unselective collecting" — "you offer it to us and we will collect it." The people of the region responded with donations of all kinds ranging from small everyday objects to steam engines and shops, filling an entire army camp of 22 huts and hangars at Brancepeth.

The first exhibition was held in Beamish Hall in 1971, and the present site was opened to visitors for the first time in 1972 with the first translocated buildings (the railway station and colliery winding engine) being erected the following year. The approximately 300-acre (1.2 km2) current site, once belonging to the Eden and Shafto families, is a basin-shaped steep-sided valley with woodland areas, a river, some level ground and a south-facing aspect. Since 1986 visitors have entered the museum, which has been 96% self-funding for some years (mainly from admission charges), through an entrance arch formed by a steam hammer, across a former opencast mining site and through a converted stable block (from Greencroft, near Lanchester, County Durham).