Our Collections

Beamish Museum is here for the people of the North East and to help preserve and celebrate their heritage. We deliver the Beamish Charter - caring for and presenting the social, agricultural and industrial heritage of the North East in an engaging and dynamic way.

One of the most remarkable and fascinating features of Beamish is its vast object, photographic and oral history collections. These include the social history collections which record and illustrate the everyday life of north east people and comprise large and important collections of furniture, ornaments and house fittings, objects connected with cooking, laundry and housekeeping implements, historic textiles such as quilts, patchwork coverlets, rag rugs and samplers.

There is a good collection of costume, which includes everything from wedding dresses, everyday dress to unusual survivals of working dress, including pitmen's hoggers and farmer's breeches.

Working lives are represented by comprehensive collections from heavy industries such as mining, quarrying and engineering to trades and other occupations such as printing, sweetmaking, shopkeeping (the Co-operative store has drapers, grocers and hardware departments) and farming.

The agricultural collections are the only major regional collections in the north east and cover everything from early ploughs and cultivation implements, through hay rakes, scythes and sickles, to early tractors and large threshing machines.

The transport collections include railway, tram, horse drawn and internal combustion vehicles: - full size working replicas of early steam locomotives, such as Locomotion and Puffing Billy, original colliery locomotives such as the Coffee pots and saddle tanks, coal wagons of all types, known locally as chaldrons, farm wagons and carts, horse traps and carriages, and an interesting collection of bicycles, as well as the collection of cars, buses and working trams.  The locally made Armstrong Whitworth car is on display in the garage, but  a replica is used occasionally on site.

Corporate life is represented by the banking and legal, as well as the Masonic, collections.

All of these object collections are supported by huge audio-visual, library and archive resources, including a large collection of original trade catalogues containing examples of almost every item ever manufactured, from ranges and fireplaces, to billhooks and reaping machines, all manner of tools and to ready-to wear clothing.