Beamish Lamp Cabin
The largest new development of the proposed improvements to The Colliery Village at Beamish is the construction of a colliery Lamp Cabin.
All collieries required a Lamp Cabin building in order to maintain and distribute safety lamps to the men working underground, and without one the Beamish Colliery Village is noticeably incomplete. A Lamp Cabin here will not only serve to further add to the accuracy of the period reconstruction, but will play several other roles as well.
The project to recreate a colliery Lamp Cabin, built using appropriate period materials and traditional building techniques, will not only provide an exciting and important period exhibit when finished, but an interesting opportunity for the Museum’s visitors to see the process taking place within one of the Museum’s period areas. The architectural style of the Lamp Cabin is representative of early 20th Century colliery architecture across the region, and is a type of architecture the Beamish Colliery does not yet represent and interpret for our visitors.
Visitors will begin their tour of the Mahogany Drift Mine at Beamish by metaphorically “collecting their lamp” to take underground and “do their shift at the coalface”. The current Drift Mine tour is presented as a walk to work in a coal mine: part of this walk for most miners would include a visit to the Lamp Cabin, and the Beamish Lamp cabin will realistically represent the experience of people in the past and relate that experience to visitors.
Beamish holds a nationally important collection of safety lamps and of mines safety and rescue equipment. Currently, little of this equipment is on display to visitors, as most requires carefully controlled environmental conditions. The new Lamp Cabin will allow Beamish to portray something of the heroic work undertaken by generations of mines rescue workers, alongside coal mining tools and equipment, ranging from wooden tools of the mid to late 18th and early 19th centuries, up to late 20th century pneumatic picks and tool kits.
The Lamp Cabin is expected to open to visitors in Spring 2009.
