Learning (Supported by 'Renaissance West Midlands')

Blists Hill Victorian Town

At Blists Hill Victorian Town visitors are transported back to a world of pounds, shillings and pence, where steam engines and horses powered industry and gas and candles lit shops, factories and homes.

Gain a real understanding of what life was like in the late Victorian period by exploring numerous exhibits and interacting with costumed demonstrators and actors across the site.

 The main curriculum area covered is Victorian history but with opportunities for art, literacy, mathematics and citizenship links. 

The site requires 2.5 – 3 hours for a visit.  It covers an area of approximately 50 acres and is a largely outdoor site.  You will need to be adequately dressed for the weather and walking on unmade roads.

Coalport China Museum

You can see how designs in decorative china have changed to reflect the tastes and fashions of society since the factory was established in 1796.

The working environment for Victorian employees can still be seen and the conditions imagined by going into the bottle kilns and work rooms. The social history gallery gives a picture of life for the workforce and the health risks involved in the china industry.

Enginuity

This is our interactive design and technology centre. As a source of inspiration for designing and making products it offers tremendous opportunities for Science and D&T visits for pupils of all ages.

It has separate zones based on: Materials & Structures, Systems & Control, Energy and Design which use an exciting combination of interactive exhibits and real objects to demonstrate the designing and making process.

Direct links between the usefulness of old and new technology are brought alive using the novel Scan-It system. This enables the visitor to target a wide range of products with an infra-red handset to call up information through entertaining and enlightening video footage, text and games.

Jackfield Tile Museum

This once huge factory, purpose built in 1874, now houses Jackfield Tile Museum and a still working factory.

See examples of some of the best floor and wall tiles produced at the height of this popular form of decoration. From a church to a living room, butcher's shop, underground station, hospital and public house you can see the practical and purely decorative uses of tiles.

The significance of the river, railway and availability of raw materials to the development of the industry in this area are told in this newly renovated exhibition.

Museum of Iron

The first floor exhibition is arranged around a model showing Coalbrookdale in 1805, when the Ironworks were at their most influential internationally. 

The second floor houses a display of the decorative cast iron work from the 1851 Great Exhibition.

On the same site is the furnace where Abraham Darby I first smelted iron using coke instead of charcoal in 1709.   The displays examine the developments which followed.

A short walk from the Museum of Iron are the Darby Houses.  These were built by the Darby family and inhabited by a succession of Coalbrookdale Company managers.  Dale House contains the study from which the building of the Iron Bridge was supervised.

Rosehill House is decorated in a mid-Victorian style, demonstrating the change in fashion and the Darby family’s own move away from the strict Quaker austerity of the earlier dwelling.

Museum of the Gorge

Sited in the town of Ironbridge on the banks of the River Severn.  The  model of the Gorge in the late eighteenth century shows the area was a hive of industrial activity.  Displays show how the development of industry was related to the geology of the area, geography of the region and river valley and historical factors.

There are also displays on river management and pollution. 

A short walk following the river through the town, along pavements edged in cast iron, brings you to the Iron Bridge erected in 1779 to celebrate the potential of iron