These days it’s called the Weald & Downland Living Museum but back in 2008 when we drove the short distance from our home to just north of Chichester to visit, it was called the Open Air Museum and that’s the name that’s stuck with us.
Weald & Downland is a large site that hosts vernacular buildings – that is, buildings typically built by local people using local materials and knowledge, and without the use of an architect – dating from the tenth through to the twentieth centuries. These buildings would have been at risk of destruction but were carefully dismantled, transported, and rebuilt in the West Sussex countryside in order to allow visitors these days to see what homes would have looked like over the course of the last millennium.
People familiar with the BBC programme The Repair Shop might recognise the museum as that’s where it’s all filmed but it’s also hosted numerous other shows and even featured in the Amazon production of Good Omens.
The remainder of this post is simply photos of Weald & Downland museum with no further explanation. Sadly, my memory of where exactly we walked and what we saw during this visit isn’t good enough for detailed explanations of each building, and I didn’t take anywhere near as many pictures as I would probably do these days, with the period captured below still being fairly early in my photography mania. However, for a brief description of the buildings you can expect to see at the open air museum there’s a handy list on the museum Wikipedia page.
