Enjoy this sneak peek around the latest addition to Beamish Museum's 1950s town

Sunderland Echo

Enjoy a tour around one the Aged Miners' Cottages and hear from Beamish Museum's CEO Rhiannon Hiles and head of industry Jonathan Kindleysides.

Transcript

00:00 I'm here at Beamish Museum for the opening of the 1950s miners cottages which were originally

00:05 in Marsden. It's all part of the redevelopment of Beamish project in the creation of a 1950s

00:10 town. So I'm going to enjoy a look around and see what we've got.

00:14 Right, just going to have a little walking tour through one of the cottages here. So

00:18 I'm just coming through into the entrance here. And as we come through you can see we've

00:23 got the kitchen. Got the old style gas hob and gas oven there. Very old fashioned cupboards.

00:32 So if we go back to the 50s. The sink there. You can see where they would have used to

00:41 store a lot of the herbs and stuff which would have been used in traditional cooking at the

00:44 time. Always a lot of people did a lot more baking and what have you around just going

00:47 to the supermarket back then. So again we've got the weighing scales and various instruments

00:52 used for cooking there. The cake box. In the 1950s not everyone had a fridge so if we come

01:00 here we've got what would have been the pantry or the larder here. You can see again some

01:03 of the food produce of the time. Washing up sink there. We move through here we're now

01:12 coming into the living room. Coming in here it does jog memories of visiting older relatives

01:21 houses. I was born in the 70s so obviously I don't go back to the 1950s. But a lot of

01:26 my older relatives, my great aunts, my great uncles, my grandmother obviously kept a lot

01:32 of stuff which they would have had from going back to the war. A lot of the style of furniture

01:37 here does take me back to going to some of my older relatives houses. You can see here

01:43 you've got the old radio there. Again back in the 1950s not many people would have had

01:49 a TV at that point. It was invented obviously but unless you were pretty wealthy you wouldn't

01:54 have one. These cottages obviously originated from Marsden so you can see Marsden Rock there

02:00 before the arch collapsed. Which was probably over 20 years ago now I would have thought.

02:06 Again coming through into the bedroom. Really jogs my memory in terms of some of my older

02:14 relatives. I'm sure my great aunt used to have a wardrobe exactly like that. Similar

02:20 with the dressing table looks very familiar with what I remember in terms of going to

02:24 my older relatives houses when I was a child. And yeah obviously a lot of these houses when

02:31 they were built may not have had central heating so at that time it would have been a fire

02:34 in the different rooms. You've got obviously a fire in the living room there and also you've

02:38 got one here in the bedroom.

02:39 Okay Anne-Rianne I'm going to start by asking about the cottages here and where they originated

02:45 from and why you were so keen to get them as part of the 1950s Beamish town.

02:49 Yeah so we're in the next area that's going to be opened here at the museum and this is

02:55 really exciting for us. These cottages that we're standing at the back of now at the moment

02:59 are from Marsden. They're a copy of the cottages that stand at Marsden and they're aged miners

03:03 homes and we're really working hard with our communities to represent what those cottages

03:08 might have felt like during the 1950s which is challenging because people aren't really

03:12 around to tell us that now but we've worked with the communities and we've worked with

03:15 people who still live in cottages like this around the Durham area of which there are

03:19 lots of examples. These ones are pretty fine, they're lovely. The fronts of them have got

03:23 the lovely topping along the ridges and they're beautiful to look at so we're very pleased

03:27 that we were able to copy these ones from original plans as well which is really exciting.

03:33 So I think in terms of the next development for the museum this is phenomenal. The museum

03:37 is developing constantly with the Remake and Beamish project and to get these open has

03:41 been a big task. Michelle Kindeside who heads up our health and wellbeing programme has

03:46 worked really hard particularly in the cottages towards the latter end of this terrace in

03:49 terms of the dementia programme, the health and wellbeing programme which is really, really

03:53 popular and reaches out to a lot of people. This is going to enable us to do more work

03:57 there. But I'm here with Jonathan who knows a lot more about the history of these cottages

04:01 and the history of the aged miners so I'll just hand over to Jonathan if that's alright.

04:05 I was just going to ask Jonathan, so in terms of these cottages, were they basically built

04:08 for retired miners, is that what the role was? They were, so yeah they were originally

04:11 built in 1914 so at the time built by the Durham Mine Workers Homes Association which

04:17 was a revolutionary organisation at the time. It was one of the very earliest forms of social

04:22 housing so at a time when miners relied on their job for the house so if they had to

04:27 retire through ill health or age they lost the house that was tied to the job. So the

04:32 Durham Mine Workers Homes Association to be able to provide homes for those retired miners,

04:37 it was like I say the very earliest form of social housing.

04:41 [Music]

04:43 [Music]

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