BCLM: Forging Ahead at Black Country Living Museum

BCLM: Forging Ahead is a £30 million project at the Black Country Living Museum (BCLM) in Dudley, West Midlands, telling the story of the Black Country region, 1945– 1968. BCLM is an open-air living museum, currently tracing the history of the region between 1712 and 1939, and its interpretation focuses on interactions with costumed historic characters in accurately reproduced historic environments including mines, factories, shops and homes. Forging Ahead is the largest single development since BCLM opened in 1978 and has been supported by several major funders. Alongside new visitor and learning centres the project’s focus is a new historic town and industrial area. The Black Country, comprising the coal and metalworking communities north and west of Birmingham, was central to Britain’s recovery from World War Two. Its industry ran at full capacity during the war, and it was thus ideally placed to meet the manufacturing and export needs of the country in the years after. The Black Country made everything from hammers to washing machines, bicycle saddles to heavy engineering. This capacity, combined with a severe postwar labour shortage, drove up wages and working conditions: for the first time, the Black Country’s working class shared to some degree in its wealth, and the region became one of the country’s most prosperous industrial areas. This was matched by bold new approaches to social democracy and public provision, resulting in the transformation of a notoriously derelict landscape by new housing, town centres and industry (Figure 1). This story will be told using over twenty buildings set in the postwar years. Although changing heritage policy means that the traditional method of moving buildings brickby-brick is less feasible than when the museum first opened, there will be some ‘translocated’ buildings in the project. The most notable is Woodside Library, from Holly Hall, Dudley. Originally opened in 1894 on land donated by the Earl of Dudley, Woodside Library closed in 2008. In its new home at BCLM, it will tell stories of reading and education in the 1960s, including Dudley’s pioneering library service, whose director A. M. Wilson introduced records, paperbacks and children’s clubs to borough libraries. Recreations of lost buildings include Stanton’s music shop from Dudley, Smith Edge Tools from Oldbury, and Langer’s Army & Navy Stores from Stourbridge. We are replicating some buildings that are still in existence to tell other key stories – for instance, an NHS infant welfare centre from Wolverhampton and one of the oldest family-run newsagents in the country, Burgin’s from Dudley.