Being A Local Tourist

I've not done quite so much crafting this week. Partly becuase my old sinus problems have flared up again - oh joy! And partly because the sun has been shining much of the time. It's not that warm but it does inspire you to get out and about which is exactly what I did this morning. Although showers were forecast for later in the day I decided that I needed to get out and so headed to one of my favourite places Blists Hill Victorian Town.

 

Now I might have mentioned this place before, it is a local living history museum. This is the entrance building.

 It is really good because you really do go back in time as you move from the modern reception area into a large darkened where films of the industrial processes that dominated are shown on all of the walls. In half light you climb a set of stairs and emerge into a late victorian town.

This is the first view you get of the main street. It isn't usually this quiet but I was the first member of the public in there this morning, great for getting photos of the buildings without someone walking into shot.

The museum is 40 years old this year and I have been visiting it since I was a little girl of seven or eight. We used to go regularly from my primary school, entrance was free but we used to have to pay a few pence towards the transport there (in the ancient school minibus but that's another story entirely!)
Of course it's changed a lot since then though some of the buildings in the main street have always been there, others I can remember arriving. I say arriving because most of the buildings were rescued from other places, taken apart brick by brick and rebuilt and some times repurposed.

The biggest redevelopment in recent years saw the building of that amazing entrance and the addition of a whole new street; canal street.

This is it from the canal end.

I took about a hundred photos this morning and would have taken more but my camera battery went flat - whoops! And I'm sure that many of them will appear here in due course. I have a scrapbook album just for the museum and lots of ideas for new pages for it. I could go on sharing photos and stories about the place all day but don't want to bore anyone so I'll stick with one.

This building is the squatters cottage and it came from less than two miles from where I grew up, it is one of the exhibits that have been there the longest and I have always been fascinated with it.

Squatters cottages were not unusual in this area because they played upon a loophole in the law. They were built on land belonging to large landowners and had to be build and roofed in a single day and at the end of the day a fire had to be lit so that smoke came out of the chimney. The occupants were then able to stay living on land they didn't own without paying regular rent to the landowner, a small 'fine' was instead payable annually.
As a child I was amazed that not only was the building put together quickly but that as many people lived in it as did. In the 1861 census it was occupied by a cobbler, his wife, five sons and two daughters between the ages of 24 and 5 and a ten year old visitor. Ten people in two rooms, I always wondered where they all slept.
Later I learnt that one branch of my own family were squatters and that another lived a few hundred yards from where this cottage had originally stood. Perhaps not so surprising that I found it so appealing then.

Oh and the local tourist title? In case you have been wondering that is one of my aims for this summer to visit some of the wonderful places that I am able to describe as local and scrap them (maybe blog about them too).