From a stray meteorite to an immersive coal pit, via the chance to sit on a ‘feeding chair’, famous fans tell us how they fell in love with the UK’s Museum of the Year finalists
It’s rare to hear someone getting this excited over a teapot. But as Terry Deary tells me, with exactly the kind of relish you’d expect from the author of Horrible Histories, this particular drinks vessel belonged to the Victorian-era mass murderer Mary Ann Cotton. Believed to have killed 12 of her children, not to mention three husbands, she was finally caught after poisoning her stepson in 1872 with an arsenic-laced brew. “And in Beamish they’ve got the teapot!” says Deary. “I was blown away to hold it!”
He’s talking about Beamish, the Living Museum of the North, an open-air site based in County Durham (just like Cotton herself, who was eventually hanged in Durham Gaol). Featuring an 1820s tavern, a 1900s pit village and colliery, a 1940s farm and a 1950s town – all populated by costumed staff – it’s something of a pioneer when it comes to immersive experiences, having first opened its doors 55 years ago. This year it’s one of five museums nominated for the Art Fund Museum of the Year award, a prestigious prize that has previously been won by The Burrell Collection in Glasgow, London’s Horniman Museum and Gardens and the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield. With £120,000 available to the winner (and £15,000 to the other four finalists), it is the world’s largest museum prize.
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