Ironbridge is a settlement on the River Severn, at the heart of the Ironbridge Gorge. It developed beside, and takes its name from, the famous Iron Bridge, a 30-metre (100 ft) cast iron bridge that was built across the river in 1779.
We started at Blists Hill - an open air museum and one of ten museums operated by the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust. It is built on a former industrial complex located in the Madeley area of Telford.
Blists Hill Victorian Town, originally called Blists Hill Open Air
Museum, was opened in 1973, and has been slowly growing ever since. The
museum's buildings fall into one of three categories: buildings that were
already part of the industrial site (e.g. the brickworks); buildings that
simply represent a generic type (e.g. the sweet shop), some adaptively reusing
existing premises on site or being replicas of those still standing elsewhere;
and original buildings that have been relocated to the museum (e.g. The New Inn
public house, which originally stood between Green Lane and Hospital Street in
Walsall).
Each building is manned by one or more costumed demonstrators, who have
been trained in the skills and history of the profession they re-enact. For
example, in the printshop, visitors can watch posters and newssheets being
printed. Staff may also be seen performing such diverse tasks as operating
stationary steam engines, iron founding and mucking out pigs.
The first building you see in the museum is the bank (modelled on the still-standing Lloyds Bank branch in Broseley), at which they can change modern coinage into token coinage that represents the pre-decimal farthings, halfpennies, pennies, threepenny bits and sixpences, at an exchange rate of 40 new pence to 1 old penny. They can then use the token coins as an alternative to modern currency for buying goods whilst visiting the museum.
Here are some photos of the Victorian Town
The local policeman doing his rounds on his bike
The pharmacy
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Blists Hill was an industrial region consisting of a brick and tile works, blast furnaces and coal, iron and fire clay mining.
A Trevithick steam engine
The Post Office houses the British Postal Museum - see web link for further details
Postal Museum
The candle maker
The blacksmith
A short section of the Shropshire Canal ran across the site to the Hay Inclined Plane, which transported boats up and down the 207 ft (63 m) tall incline from Blists Hill to Coalport.
We visited the Tar Tunnel where miners struck a gushing spring of natural bitumen, a black treacle-like substance, when digging a canal tunnel for the Coalport Canal in 1787. The original plan was to connect the canal alongside the River Severn to the lower galleries of the mines below the Blists Hill area. After digging some 3,000ft into the hill the canal project was abandoned in favour of bitumen extraction.
The tunnel was a great curiosity in the eighteenth century and bitumen still oozes gently from the brick walls today. Bitumen's chief commercial use at the time was to treat and weatherproof ropes and caulk wooden ships, but small amounts were processed and bottled as a remedy for rheumatism.
We then visited the Enginuity Museum - the latest addition to the Ironbridge Gorge Museums and is located in one of the old Coalbrookdale Company's buildings
The museum starts with all the earliest inventions and takes you through to the modern day inventors and scientists.
The idea is that you see an object and one way or another you find out all about it, by either turning wheels, pushing buttons, pulling cables etc
And you can end up getting wet, whistling a tune to match the sounds on a mobile phone, moving a steam engine single- handedly, floating on a magnetic platform, looking into the insides of various objects with an x-ray machine, constructing arches etc and not realizing how much you are learning along the way.
Great fun - see more details at Ironbridge Gorge Museums
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