Black Country Living Museum
The main village street
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| Established | 1975 |
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| Location | Dudley, West Midlands |
| Type | Local history |
| Director | Andrew Lovett |
| Website | www |
The Black Country Living Museum (formerly The Black Country Museum) is an open-air museum of rebuilt historic buildings in Dudley in the West Midlands of England. It is located in the centre of the Black Country conurbation, 10 miles west of Birmingham. The museum occupies 105,000 square metres (26 acres) of former industrial land partly reclaimed from a former railway goods yard, disused lime kilns and former coal pits.
The Museum opened to the public in 1978, and has since added over 50 shops, houses and other industrial buildings from around the Metropolitan Boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell and Walsall and the City of Wolverhampton (collectively known as the Black Country); mainly in a specially built village. Most buildings were relocated from their original sites to form a base from where demonstrators portray life spanning 300 years of history, with a focus on 1850-1950.
The museum is constantly changing as new exhibits, especially buildings, are being added.
The museum is close to the site where Thomas Dudley first mastered the technique of smelting iron with coal instead of wood charcoal and making iron enough for industrial use. Having a claim to be "the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution", the Black Country is famous for its wide range of midsteel-based products from nails to the anchor and anchor chain for the Titanic.
The site's coal mining heritage is shown by an underground drift and colliery surface buildings. The museum has a working replica of a Newcomen atmospheric engine. Thomas Newcomen's invention was first successfully put to use in Tipton in 1712. The museum's reconstruction was based on a print engraved by Thomas Barney, filemaker of Wolverhampton, in 1719.
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