Taking you back: Region, industry and technologies of living history at Beamish

Abstract

Many critics have linked the rise of heritage with a loss of primary manufacturing, an association particularly resonant for industrial living history museums such as Beamish. In the context of pastoral heritage representations, the museum develops competing modernizing and industrial strains in English identity. Through its incorporation of industry, Beamish cuts against the suggestion that people and culture organically spring from native soil. Framing itself as ethnographic, the museum supposes a gap between the culture presented and those of its visitors. Yet this presentation inscribes comforting accounts of class and modernity. Through living history museum techniques, Beamish appeals for its visitors to identify with the represented past so as to suggest more firmly a gulf between present and industrial past. As a result, Beamish is less concerned with presenting the past then shoring up a notion of the present as advanced stage of modernity.

Imagining Englishness through contested English landscapes

“…The landscape is formed from the industries that previously inhabited the sites – both above and below ground – as are the people. To acknowledge these traces of the past in the present is to present an authentic landscape (Jones, 2010), whereas to hark back to an imagined ‘natural’ prior state is to buy into a potentially destructive form of nostalgia which denies an element of the past use of the land and the people who worked there (Kingsnorth, 2008; Trimm, 2012). The full story of the global trade, an essential aspect of the development of the coal and salt mining industries, is missing, however, once again ‘white washing’ the English landscape (Tyler, 2012).…”

“…The mediated sites I have chosen to illustrate an idea of English landscapes and their relation to an English identity are local and particular with specific histories (cf. Hill, 2013; Jones and Cloke, 2008; Lorimer, 2014; Trimm, 2012; Wylie, 2012). Their histories bleed into wider histories of England and forms of Englishness and therefore can be illustrative.…”

Informal heritage-making at the Sarawak Cultural Village, East Malaysia

“…Indeed, as the Skansen case exemplifies, such theme parks cauterize the motion of time and preserve traditions at risk of being lost due to modernization (Gordon, 2009). Trimm (2012) also refers to them as liminal spaces that satisfy their nostalgic longing for the past and escape stresses of contemporary society. They also allow for urban dwellers to familiarize with the cultures of others in the nation with whom they might never meet in reality, thus strengthening imagined communities (Yang, 2011a).…”