One of the most remarkable and fascinating features of Beamish is its collections. A policy of unselective collecting pursued in the museum's early years resulted in a wealth of material relating to the regional history being collected. Our Collections Online highlight an ever expanding selection from the vast object collections held at Beamish.
Select from one of the collections below:
The Online Collections are not limited by date but cover
periods from the 1600s until the present day. They
include all aspects of social and domestic life, farming
and rural life, industrial and town life as well
as transport and advertising. Browse here...
Complementing
the reference library and photographic
archive is the audio history collection.
Access the online
audio collection here...
audio collection here...
Beamish’s
Printed Book Collection consists of some 64,000 published
books of the late 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries. Over
17,000 exisit in our online database. Search here...
The
photographic archive at Beamish consists of some
300,000 images representing everyday life in the
North of England
from 1860 to the present day. The collection illustrates
towns and street scenes, rural life and farming scenes,
industrial scenes of coal mining, lead mining, iron
and steel. View here...
Beamish
Museum’s reference library also houses a magnificent
collection of trade catalogues of suppliers and manufacturers
dated from around the 1820s up to the present day.
Access the online database here...
Access the online database here...