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Coalbrookdale Museum Of Iron, Shropshire

The Museum of Iron and the Darby Furnaces in Shropshire's Severn Valley commemorate one of the most important events in the Industrial Revolution. Iron was being made in the Severn Valley from the reign of Henry VIII. At this time iron was produced in small batches, using charcoal to generate the heat required to smelt iron ore. With charcoal becoming increasingly expensive, the early eighteenth century ironmaster Abraham Darby of Bristol was experimenting with coke, a fuel produced by baking coal at high temperatures. The best coal for coke production was mined in Coalbrookdale in the Severn Valley, Shropshire, so that's where Darby relocated his business in 1709. Darby was proved right about coke, and he was able to produce iron more cheaply in larger quantities. The company started out making cooking pots, quickly expanding into the production of cast iron steam engine cylinders, and bridges, as seen at the Iron Bridge. Coalbrookdale - then a name for the whole area rather than the single town of today - became one of the most important industrialised areas in the world during the eighteenth century.

The Iron Bridge

The Museum of Iron tells the Coalbrookdale Company's story using models, audio visual displays and working exhibits. On the top floor is a display about the Great Exhibition held at Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in 1831. This exhibition was important in encouraging industrial design. This was a new discipline in which people conceived products which would then be built by other people. Design had not existed until the Industrial Revolution. Before the eighteenth century the person who made a product was generally also the person who conceived it. Design took some time to be accepted in Britain. The Great Exhibition began to change this, and had a profound impact on industry generally. The Iron Bridge built by Abraham Darby III between 1779 and 1781 was designed by Thomas Farnolls Pritchard, and illustrates an early application of industrial design to beautiful effect.

From the museum you can walk up the beautiful wooded Severn Valley, and look down on evidence of huge industrial activity. There are reservoirs and dams of a water power system, a blast furnace used Abraham Darby's company, an iron masters' house, workers' cottages, factories, workshops. And yet all of this industrial architecture exists in an idyllic wooded landscape. Popular contemporary engravings and drawings of the Iron Bridge would place the structure in a fanciful natural landscape. That historical image of the Ironbridge has in a sense been made real in the Ironbridge Gorge of today. The whole place is an industrial museum, but it is also an idealised picture of industry and nature existing together, perhaps an illustration of hopes for the future as well as a museum of the past.

Directions: Leave the M54 at junction 4 or 6, and follow signs for Ironbridge Gorge. Then follow signs for Coalbrookdale Museum. Click here for an interactive map centred on Ironbridge.

Opening Times: Open daily, all year, 10am - 5pm.

Address: Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, Coach Road, Coalbrookdale, Telford Shropshire TF8 7DQ.

The postcode for Coalbrookdale Museum of Iron is TF8 7DP

Access: A lift provides wheelchair access to all floors. Adapted toilet facilities are provided. The coffee shop can provide easy grip cutlery on request. The Darby furnaces are located at the end of a long path, with a steep ramp.

Contact:

telephone: 01952 884391

web site: http://www.ironbridge.org.uk/