Tick Tock
16/9/24
Weald and Downland Living Museum
The Weald and Downland Living Museum is an amazing place where you truly feel like you are stepping back in time. It is an absolutely brilliant place to visit if you are learning about homes in the past or Anglo Saxon, Tudor or Victorian times.
All the buildings on the site have been saved from being destroyed and are from the south east of the country, near to where the museum is located. The buildings have been carefully taken down and then rebuilt exactly how they were originally. There are fascinating examples of homes, as well as public and working buildings.
There is so much to see and do, I am never going to be able to show you everything there is to see there…it is definitely somewhere you should visit yourself! You can find out more about visiting on their Weald and Downland website. It would be a brilliant day out with your family and an excellent place to visit for a school trip.
Homes at Weald and Downland
At the Weald and Downland Living Museum they have lots of different homes, from different periods of time. It was fascinating to see how the buildings improved over time. Look through our timeline of photos showing just five of the homes at the museum (there are lots more!), from the one of the earliest homes to one of the most modern.
What do you notice? What changes and improvements can you see?
This flint cottage would have been built the 13th century (between 1201 and 1300). It had a tiny window, which you could close by using a wooden shutter.
Inside was one big main room (which you can see in the photo) and a smaller room which had a type of oven in, a bit like a bread oven built out of the same flint as the rest of the building.
Bayleaf Farmhouse was built in the early 15th century (1401 - 1500). It is a timber framed house. It had a lot more windows than the medieval house so was a lot lighter inside. These windows were openings, there was no glass, but they had shutters to close them.
Inside it was set out to show what it would have looked like during the Tudor Times. It had a main room, heated by a fireplace. One end was service rooms and the other had rooms for the owner and their family. Upstairs there were several rooms to sleep in.
Poplar Cottage was built in the middle of the 17th Century (1601 - 1700). Can you spot where the smoke from the fireplace would have escaped in the roof?
It had two floors, divided into separate rooms. The main room downstairs was heated with a big fireplace.
Tindalls Cottage was built in the early 18th century (1701 - 1800). This was the first house at the museum to have glass in the windows and it had a proper chimney!
The house had several rooms for different uses and a big fireplace with a proper chimney to heat the main living space.
Whittaker's Cottage was built in the 19th century (around 1860) and is an example of what houses would have looked like during Victorian Times.
Inside the downstairs had a living room and kitchen. Upstairs had bedrooms. It looked a lot more like homes do now than the earlier homes.
Did you look carefully at each of the photos? What did you see? Or didn’t see?
The first Medieval Cottage had one big living space, and reminded me of the earlier homes built during Anglo Saxon times or before. The rest of the houses were split into rooms, with separate living and sleeping spaces. Most of these houses didn’t have glass in the windows as glass only started being used in the 17th and 18th centuries. There were no carpets or comfy seats. Only the last house had curtains and was a bit more ‘decorated’. The only form of heating in the houses was a fireplace, and that was only in one room. The earlier houses didn’t have chimneys and would have been very smoky inside. Some of the houses then had smoke bays, which allowed smoke to escape from a gap in the roof and finally they had chimneys like we have today. There were no lights or electricity. None of the houses had a bathroom, but some did have a type of toilet. All the houses had a space a bit like a kitchen and somewhere to cook food, but none of them had running water or a fridge.
How do these houses compare to your home? Which of the houses would you prefer to live in? Can you imagine what life would have been like living in one of these houses?
Buildings at Weald and Downland
Not only do they have amazing examples of what homes would have looked like in the past, there is also lots of other buildings too. Here are just four of my favourite that I enjoyed looking around.
An amazing example of a Tudor kitchen from the early 16th century (1501 - 1600). It was very smoky inside because of the fire on the floor used for cooking. There was also a stone oven which looked like a bread oven.
Built in 1620, the bottom of this building was used for selling goods. The room above was used for town council meetings. There was even a little prison cell under the stairs!
It is thought this building was built near the end of the 15th century (1401 - 1500).
This little school was from the early 19th century (1801 - 1900). Can you imagine what it would have been like over two hundred years in a school like this?
I have shown you a glimpse of what you can see at the Weald and Downland Living Museum. There is so much more to see and explore, you really should go and see yourself! But if you can’t make it there anytime soon I do have one suggestion that will help you explore some of these buildings in a lot more detail. On the Weald and Downland website they have a virtual tour of four of the buildings, including two of the homes I introduced you to above. Its almost like you are there yourself and it is amazing how much detail you can see. Click on the pictures below to go to their website and have a look. To get to the virtual tour, scroll down on the page and then find the picture with the play button. Click the play button and it will take you to the interactive virtual tour…
All photos and illustrations in this blog post are Whizzbots Images (apart from the bottom four images which link to the Weald and Downland Living Museum).
Other images on the site may be Shutterstock and Public Domain and Creative Commons Images.