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        Beamish North of England Open Air Museum

        A β€˜living museum’ at Beamish rides the waves of interest in industrial heritage in the 1970s. [78]

        1976 26 mins

        From the collection of:

        Logo for North East Film Archive

        Overview

        A world away from Disney, a theme park of a different kind takes shape in County Durham. The inspirational director Frank Atkinson is creating the Beamish open-air museum, a theatre of memory for the late industrial society in North East England. The bricolage of reconstructed buildings and artefacts on site, all genuine and rooted in the region, include a colliery village (without the coal dust), an electric tramway and Rowley’s abandoned railway station.

        This programme in the Tyne Tees Television series β€˜Treasures in Store’ was first broadcast on 16 March 1976. Atkinson’s pioneering British venture was inspired by open-air museums at Skansen in Sweden and Lillehammer in Norway that he first visited in the 1950s. The opening β€˜Museum in the Making’ display at Beamish in 1971 attracted 50,000 visitors, a national record prior to the British Museum’s Tutankhamun exhibition.