Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Back to the Future at Beamish

Beamish Museum June 14 (11)

The recent news that Beamish Museum is to be awarded £600,000 by the Heritage Lottery Fund to complete the bid for a further £10 million towards the cost of the next phase of the Museum's development was celebrated tonight at an event for business people. If all goes to plan, Beamish will recreate a 1950s town centre. The former Airey prefabricated homes carefully dismantled and moved from Kibblesworth will be rebuilt as part of the development. The other part of the bid is the completion of the 1820s section of the museum, including a coaching inn and windmill.

I went along to the event at the museum tonight. A 1950s caravan had been placed in the town and the front room of one of the terrace houses had been restored to what it would have been like in the 1950s, complete with a television showing the coronation. This all reminded me of one of my favourite films, "Back to the Future" in which Michael J Fox goes back to 1954 (admittedly a year after the coronation).

Assuming the museum is successful in its final bid for the HLF grant, the 1950s town should be completed later this decade.

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