Black Country Museum

We've had a fab day today. We met Mr K's mum at the Black Country Museum in Dudley.
We practically had it to ourselves as obviously everybody else in the West Midlands was Christmas shopping. Fantastic!
It is such an interesting, evocative place.
We had fish and chips from the 1930s chippy which were yummy.
We went down a coal mine and had a taste of the darkness and unspeakable conditions which people worked in, starting from five years old.
The Little Misses have been warned that we may send them down the mine if they don't behave!
They wore hard hats and were very brave in total darkness and being rocked by a huge explosion!
We walked beside the canal and saw how the men pulled the boats along.
We played in the street with old fashioned children's hoops.
We went into a 1900s toll house and heard the story of the destitute family who lived there. And the daughter who came back to visit the house in situ in the museum when she was 96. Amazing!
My favourite was the school. The volunteer in there was so interesting to talk to and was fantastic with the Little Misses telling them about how school would have been in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Two classrooms with one hundred and twenty children in each, the discipline, the punishments, the malnutrition - there were a pair of boots on display that belonged to a twelve year old. They were smaller than Miss L's shoes!
A 1930s flat decorated beautifully for Christmas with paper chains. Miss E was mystified by the huge box in the corner and very struck by the fact there was no TV!
The shops, the working men's club, the fairground, the braziers, the petrol station, the trams and buses, the blacksmiths, coal merchants, the cinema.....
I loved it.
Can you tell?!!!!