Black Country Living Museum
The Black Country Living Museum in Dudley in the West Midlands is one of the most ambitious and successful industrial heritage museums in Britain, an open-air site of approximately 26 acres built around a reconstructed canal-side industrial village that brings the working-class history of the Black Country region to life through carefully restored and recreated buildings, working period industry and costumed interpretation. The museum opened in 1978 on the site of a former coal mine and canal basin and has grown to encompass over fifty historic buildings relocated from across the region.
The heart of the museum is the reconstructed Black Country village of the late Victorian and Edwardian period, a street of shops, houses, a pub, a working fish and chip shop, a fairground and various industrial workshops that together recreate the environment of a working-class Black Country community at the height of the region's industrial prosperity. The buildings include a chain shop where anchor chain is made by hand using methods virtually unchanged since the nineteenth century, a glass-cutting workshop, a chemist, a baker and a school, all staffed by costumed guides who interpret the displays in character.
The museum occupies the site of the Dudley Canal Tunnel, a remarkable piece of early industrial engineering that passes beneath Castle Hill for nearly three kilometres, and boat trips through the tunnel provide an extraordinary experience of underground industrial archaeology. The tunnel was opened in 1792 and was an important commercial waterway during the height of the canal age, and the boat trip through the darkness offers a vivid sense of the underground landscape of coal mines, limestone workings and canal tunnels that underlies the Black Country landscape.
The museum has recently developed a 1940s section, recreating the period of the Second World War and the years of austerity that followed, extending its chronological range and adding another layer to its interpretation of this uniquely industrial British region.