Blists Hill Victorian Town
Blists Hill Victorian Town is the flagship site of Ironbridge Gorge Museums in Shropshire, an open-air living history museum recreating the sights, sounds and social texture of a working Victorian industrial town in the late nineteenth century. Set within the landscape of the Ironbridge Gorge, the first World Heritage Site in Britain, the museum occupies a site where the remains of the original Victorian industrial infrastructure including the Hay Inclined Plane, the blast furnaces and the canal arm provide authentic archaeological context for the recreation of the Victorian townscape built around them.
The Victorian town has been assembled over several decades by relocating historic buildings from across the Telford area and furnishing them with period-appropriate contents and working demonstrations. The high street of the town includes a working bank where visitors can exchange modern currency for replica Victorian coinage to spend at the shops, an ironmonger's, a chemist, a photographer's studio, a baker, a sweet shop and a pub serving Victorian-style ale. The costumed staff play their roles with detailed historical knowledge and genuine interactivity that makes the experience educational as well as entertaining.
The industrial heritage of the site provides a dimension that distinguishes Blists Hill from purely domestic Victorian recreations. The Hay Inclined Plane, a remarkable piece of industrial engineering designed to transfer canal boats between two levels of the Shropshire Canal using a counterbalanced system of rails, survives as a scheduled monument within the museum site and the interpretation of this and the other industrial remains connects the town recreation to the genuine history of the gorge's industrial period.
The wider Ironbridge Gorge museums complex encompasses ten museums including Ironbridge itself, the Coalport China Museum and Broseley Pipeworks, all within a few kilometres of Blists Hill and all dealing with different aspects of the industrial revolution that was largely initiated in this gorge.