Working In The Coal Mine

A long and tiring - but also very interesting - day out at the Beamish living history museum today. Loads to see and do and we were fortunate in the weather staying dry for most of the time. Highlights for me were riding on the trams and buses (which ferry you to the different areas of the site if you don’t fancy walking) and the reconstructed Barclays Bank in the 1900s town. You could go down to the strongrooms and they were just the same as the ones in some of the branches I worked in during the 1970s & 80s. Barclays obviously couldn’t see the point in updating those areas that the public didn’t get to see!
Part of the site is on what used to be an open cast coal mine so I thought I’d use this photo of an old power shovel that would probably have been of the type used to extract the coal back in the day. Mrs C is in the picture for scale!
Our tickets are valid for twelve months and we will definitely be back as we didn’t get to see everything and there is also a new 1950s town under construction, which should be very interesting when complete.
After leaving Beamish, we went to the Metro Centre to look at the shops and get something to eat. An utterly soul destroying experience, and I much preferred being in the old fashioned shops in Beamish where smartly dressed assistants would serve you with the goods you desired. They would even deliver those goods to you. And that would have been a whistling boy on a pushbike and not some surly youth in a van who takes a photo of you as he hands over your parcel!
A lot of people say life was better in “the good old days”. Leaving aside the technology and medicine we have the benefit of nowadays, I’m almost inclined to that point of view myself after today.