Beamish is an open-air museum in the North of England. It’s difficult to describe exactly what it is without you going there, but I’ll give it my best shot.

Basically, it’s a chance to go back in time. Once you go through the main entrance (or the side door if you’re a ‘Friend of Beamish’ and live in the area) you arrive at a tram stop.

Taking the tram clockwise, you travel back to 1913. Me, my dad (who was visiting for the weekend), BTP and SWP sat on the top deck of the open air tram watching the scenery go by (GLW had kindly volunteered to remain on the lower deck with the pushchair and picnic bags), and pointing out the scenery we were passing.

The tram then took us to the town square, where we visited Barclays Bank, with a selection of coins from the early part of the 20th Century, ledgers, quill pens and all that palaver, called in at the sweet shop, saw the old-fashioned cars (I’m no petrolhead, but there’s something beautiful about cars built before around 1940), popped in at the post office. The kids didn’t particularly fancy visiting the dentist, so we popped into the park for our picnic.

Unfortunately, while the museum had replicated a number of things beautifully about being in 1913, they had paid rather too much attention to detail: I don’t think there was really any need to have so many Edwardian wasps flying around.

After lunch, I took SWP to the public toilets and was quite pleased to find that they weren’t completely genuine (there was flushing water, you could wash and dry your hands etc). On the way back to meet everyone in the park, I made a phone call 95 years into the future in order to phone Newcastle United and check why I hadn’t got my season ticket yet.

It was just like being on the TARDIS — despite the fact we were in 1913, I managed to get through to the box office in 2008. Clever or wot?

Anyway, once we’d been to the proper toilets, we had to call in at the other toilets. These weren’t actually toilets you could use: it was an outdoor urinal made famous by the painter Bob Olley as the Westoe Netty (Westoe being the place where they were, Netty being a Geordie word for toilet), which had rather large stickers on them saying ‘Exhibit Only: Do Not Use’.

But there’s no telling some people…

We then visited Beamish station where we found a young lady in period costume sat at the station waiting for a train. I was going to tell her that no trains had been along there for 80 years, but as we were 95 years in the past, I reckoned she wouldn’t have missed it yet.

We were then contractually obliged to visit the fairground so BTP and SWP could have a turn on the carousel and in the Hall of Mirrors (they may only be children, but they know how to strike a bargain) before walking along towards the tram sheds.

At this point we could have wandered over to Home Farm (but didn’t) and simply walked past the tram sheds and some quite impressively sized pieces of machinery. As usual, I was too busy having fun with the kids to read what they actually were, or when they were from, but when you’ve got the option of helping the kids climb into a digger scoop or reading up on it… well, unless you’re a real history buff, it’s more fun playing with your kids.

From there we walked down to the colliery village, where we walked past the beer tent (I think this was a sound decision, as I believe there was another wasp enclosure nearby), and instead called in to the school, for an obligatory turn on the boolers.

A booler is basically a big metal hoop with a metal stick attached which you have to roll along the ground without it falling over. Obviously since the advent of modern technology, like Playstations, TVs, and indeed the written word, I hadn’t got much practice at this and wasn’t very good at it, but my Dad was surprisingly good.

If I was going to be mean, I would have said this was because he was really old and went to school in 1913, but of course that would be nonsense and he didn’t get to practice these at school at all. He was too busy being chased by sabre-tooth tigers…

We could have wandered further to Pockerley Manor, set further back in time in 1825, but as we didn’t want to meddle with the space time-continuum any more, and besides we needed to get back to do other stuff, we decided to call it a day there, and instead just headed back to the car.

If you’re visiting the North-East, it’s a nice place to visit, as it gives you a different view of history than a traditional museum does: instead of looking at one artifact or another, you are more or less taken back to a living, breathing 1913. It’s not cheap (£16 for adults unless you’ve got one of them ‘Friend of Beamish’ things — we have) but if you’ve got enough time to have a good wander around, you can easily spend all day there, and certainly get your money’s worth.

As far as ‘visits to England’ go, if you’re from outside the country, I’d say that as an attraction it’s better than the traditional foreign tourist traps (‘Houses of Parliament’, ‘Windsor Castle’ etc) just because it’s different. But then again, I am biased.