In a small Victorian arcade, bits and pieces of Biggar's bygone businesses have been carefully collected to create Gladstone Court Museum. Like a Lanarkshire equivalent of Eastbourne's Museum of Shops, the museum shows street life as it used to be. The effect is familar and strange at the same time.

There's one of everything useful - a bank, a photographer's studio, a printer's workshop, a cobblers and bootmakers, a school room, a chemists, a grocers, a drapers, a library and a telephone exchange. It’s amazing how many of these establishments you either don’t get at all these days, or find rarely. The ones that remain have changed beyond recognition so it’s great to go and have a rummage.

The shops are all open so you can have a fossick through trays of letters in the printers, goggle at the peculiar concoctions in the chemists - like liniments and concentrated flesh food, and sit at a really uncomfortable desk in the school room. The old grocer's shop, straight out of Open All Hours is fascinating. It's stacked to the rafters with beautiful brands, now long gone. It's not a big place but we spent quite a while there, explaining to the kids that this was how things used to be, even though it was before our time as well.

For a small town, Biggar is well-served by museums. Gladstone Court is one of 6 locally, and was opened in 1968 by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid who lived in the town. Some of his books are on show in the little library above the telephone exchange. Like many of Biggar's museums, the 21st century has passed it by. Quite fitting, really. There are no animatronic shopkeepers or interactive exhibits. But that’s fine. There’s lots of old stuff, it’s well laid out and you can play with it all to your heart's content.

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Posted by Anne on April 26, 2009 | Permalink

Tyneham in Dorset is a curious thing - a ghost village. Being ghostly, it’s not the easiest thing to find. We couldn’t see it on any road signs, but the boards saying "Village: Open" were a dead giveaway. So we followed these until some roofless cottages and an ornate white phonebox appeared - a rare K1 no less, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott in 1921. Ironically, it’s the one of the few things in Tyneham left intact.

Until 1943 this was a bustling community of 200, with its own post office, church, school and rectory. When the War Office (now the Ministry of Defence) needed some land for firing practice, the residents were asked to leave. On the door of St Mary's Church a poignant note remains:

'Please treat the church and houses with care; we have given up our homes where many of us lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.'

But they never did return. In 1948 the War Office took out a compulsory purchase order and the land was commandeered for military use. Information boards in the empty houses tell the story of the village and the campaign to get Tyneham back. Photos show residents as youngsters in the village, and as pensioners camping at the gates with placards saying "Get our village back".

In the end, the campaign to get the village back lasted longer than the war. It took over 30 years for access to the village to be restored and even then, it's only for a few days every year (officially 137). In whatever state it continues to delight and intrigue. Patrick Wright who wrote a book about it calls it "the symbol of a vanished England".

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Posted by Anne on April 08, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3)