10 things you might not know about the Black Country Living Museum

The Black Country Living Museum opened in the ‘70s and since then the Museum has grown into a literal working village which includes over 50 shops and houses and spans 26 acres. It’s basically an entire village stuck in a time capsule. Winding alleys, gas-lit cobbled streets, costumed characters sat by the fireside reading a book.. it’s easy to feel like you’ve somehow found a glitch in the matrix, and stepped straight back into Victorian Britain.

Here’s a few things you may not know about this hidden gem, which is just half an hour from Birmingham city centre by car, and even less by train.

1. All of the houses and shops were either moved ‘brick-by-brick’ or replicated from a house or shop that actually existed in the Black Country. This is an immense undertaking, and one that is brought to life by the painstaking detail with which the houses are decorated – radios left switched on, food on the table, coats hung by the door – it feels as if the re-enactors actually live here.

2. Much of BBC’s period gangster drama ‘Peaky Blinders’ is filmed at the Museum – in an interview writer and director of the series Stephen Knight said “it’s the home of Peaky Blinders”.

3. The Museum is home to Hobbs & Sons 1930s fish and chip shop where they still sell fish and chips cooked the old-fashioned way – in beef dripping. It makes the batter extra crispy and imparts a richer flavour.

4. You can actually have a Victorian school lesson in an authentic Victorian school with a Headmistress or Master who has a cane (and isn’t afraid to use it). Also, you’ll be expected to say your ABCs backwards which is a lot harder than it sounds.

5. In the Museum’s Edwardian chemist there is a space to ‘weigh your baby’ as well as a whole host of bizarre cures (including Lucozade, once sold exclusively as medicine) that the resident chemist will show you.

6. Museum has its very own ‘oss (that’s Black Country for horse), and a smaller ‘pit pony’, both of whom can be found around the site, demonstrating the history of horses during the Industrial Revolution and sometimes in costume themselves!

7. The Museum has its own pub and beer garden, all set in 1915, where you can buy a pint, eat scratchings and sit by the fire. Just don’t ask why there’s sawdust all over the floor. You really don’t want to know (hint: think about what comes after chewing tobacco).

8. You can head into the thick of a Victorian mine and, armed with a torch about as bright as a candle, the tour guide will show you what it was like to work in one of Britain’s most dangerous industries for fourteen hours a day.

9. At the Museum, the fair’s in town every day – assault a coconut, wobble your way along the Brooklyn Cakewalk and step right up for the latest and greatest in highspeed rides, The Ark!

10. The Museum even has its own motor garage, Bradburn & Wedge, where their collection of cars are kept in working in order (you’ll ocassionally see them drive past you as you’re walking around). Some of these cars are extremely rare, and the oldest is a mind-blowing 114 years old.