TAITMAIL De ja second vu
Frank Atkinson said of his creation, Beamish, The North of England Open Air Museum, that it should be “a place where people can look back into the past and see how things worked”.
It could be a succinct description of any good museum, and the realisation of this vision led to Beamish being declared Museum of the Year, winning a piece of Henry Moore sculpture. That was in 1986. The following year it was the European Museum of the Year, and also that year Atkinson retired.
Beamish, now expanded and called “The Living Museum of the North”, has won the award again. No Henry Moore sculpture this time but instead, under the auspices of Art Fund, a £120,000 purse, undreamt of riches 39 years ago. And it has won it for its “immersive and engaging experience of the region's history”. So in that respect, nothing has changed.
All those years ago Ronnie Faux of The Times had been carried away by the Beamish experience. “Piled on shelves” he wrote “are pre-war wireless sets, a clutch of miners’ lamps, a dustheap of vacuum cleaners, four lines of ancient typewriters, a spinning wheel and a couple of gramophones.
“Out of doors the collection becomes even more awesome” he went on. “There are redundant fire engines, a dismantled railway station and a steam navvy set on vast caterpillar feet – 100 tons of wheezing strength that can take seven-ton bites at the ground.”
Faux was seeing a work in progress. Inspired by Scandinavian folk museums he’d seen, Atkinson had a vision of history being brought to life by the transplantation of significant buildings in private Geordie lives. He set about acquiring the former coalfield site and funding it, and to do so recruited the help and support, sometimes financial but not always, of eight different local authorities in the region of different dimensions. It took him 14 years, and he had to ask the Coal Board to delay putting the site on the market while he raised the last of the cash.
It wasn’t the UK’s first “open air museum”, St Fagan’s in Cardiff and Avoncroft at Bromsgrove are older, but it led the zeitgeist for industrial archaeology as a public resource, allowing us to explore some of the public presences in our private lives. He transplanted a town hall, a Georgian terrace, a dentist’s, the Sun Inn from Bishop Auckland, a stationer’s and printer’s, a Co-op, a row of miners’ cottages, a working drift mine and even a railway station complete with iron bridge. He dressed what the Americans called “docents”, actor-guides, in appropriate costumes and set about immersing his visitors.
So the thing has come full circle. Now on the 350-acre site a quilter's cottage, a welfare hall, a 1950s terrace, a recreation park, a bus depot, and a 1950s farm have been added. The place is getting rising visitors numbers, pushing a million a year (well, 838,000 last year). It has won the 2025 prize because of its Remaking Beamish project, effectively creating a 1950s town, with communities consulted to bring firsthand knowledge. More than 32,000 were involved in one way or another, 14,338 schoolchildren testing out its educative and attention-grabbing faculties, with 35,000 volunteer hours to create 31 new exhibits within the museum. They’ve even added aged miners’ homes which tell the story of welfare provision for retired colliers in County Durham.
Beamish may now be “living” rather than merely “open air” but Atkinson’s vision is as bright as ever, and more real.
But only up to a point. This may be County Durham’s people in all their guises from Georgian times to, now, the 1950s, but some ask where is the trade union struggle? Where is the grinding poverty? Where is the awful mortality rate? Where is the fight against disease for the poor before the NHS?
What brings visitors is not nostalgia - you can’t be nostalgic about times in which you never lived – and it may be that there’s a need to romanticise the past in order to create a story that entertains – and some of the less attractive elements of the past get skimmed over. People won’t pay good money to be made miserable.
It can get close, though, and what has changed is the curatorial sophistication of more museums - such as the Manchester Museum, shortlisted for this prize last year, and the 2024 winner Young V&A - where close attention is paid to the demography of their audience and its responses to what they see. And in the case of “living museums” like Beamish, the buildings they have chosen to transplant and revive to evoke life in a period of history, and these are the actual spaces in which real lives were lived, where the work was done, where business was carried out, where birth, sickness and death happened.
Beamish first opened in 1972 and has been a guide to museum creators ever since. Frank Atkinsons involvement of eight different local authorities in the years before it opened not only got their political support, it involved the communities around the region contributing material and objects. So, again, what happened four decades ago in terms of public inclusion through councils and local institutions has repeated itself in a new phase for Atkinson’s dream
“Beamish is a museum brought to life by people – a joyous, immersive and unique place shaped by the stories and experiences of its community” said Jenny Waldman, CEO of the Art Fund and chair of the judges. “With three quarters of adults in the North East of England saying museums make them proud of where they live, Beamish is a shining example of how museums enrich and celebrate local communities.”
Frank Atkinson, who died in 2014 aged 90, would have concurred with that. The winner is the charm of our own past.