Fifty Years of the Bradford Industrial Museum

It's fifty years since the Bradford Industrial Museum opened, formerly Moorside Mills, a worsted spinning mill acquired by Bradford council, apparently the first local authority run industrial museum in the country.  The museum contains displays of textile machinery, steam power and motor vehicles connected with the local area.

This weekend is the 50 year celebration of the museums opening and pictured is my friend Rais with a staff member at the museum.  Rais was an engineering apprentice in 1973 and was one of a group of volunteers that assisted in the installation of some of the machines in the steam gallery, the engine on the left is one of the machines that he worked on.

Wicker Skips - Bradford Industrial Museum

Back in the late 1970's I worked for a textile machinery company, delivering machinery parts to mills around West Yorkshire.  The mills had a distinctive smell to them, a kind of mixture of wool and oil that seemed to permeate the fabric of the building.  The first floor of the Bradford Industrial Museum houses a collection of textile machinery, from early hand operated weaving looms to machines that were in use at the demise of the textile industry in this part of the world.  It also has that distinctive smell, wool and oil, it takes me back thirty five years when I walk through the door. It probably does the same for a lot of people who worked in the mills, and it probably takes them a lot further back than my thirty five years.

The History Of Bradford Speedway Exhibition

The History Of Bradford Speedway Exhibition is running until the end of November at the Bradford Industrial Museum.  Speedway motorcycles, memorabilia and literature relating to the sport and its popularity in Bradford are on display at the museum.  It's all part of Bradford's history and worth a visit even if you were never a fan of the sport (like myself).

Weaving Loom - Bradford Industrial Museum

I had a look around the Industrial Museum the other day. A party of schoolchildren were being shown around the museum at the same time, they were fascinated by this model of a child at work. The teacher explained to them that at one time children worked in the mills around Bradford, the kids were really interested, probably because the child worker would have been around the same age as the young visitors. I wish history lessons could have been more like this when I was at school, instead of all those dates, dates of important battles (the ones that we won), the year the Magna Carta was signed (it didn't matter what was in it, as long as you could remember the year that it was signed in), dates, dates, dates, important I know, but nothing you could really relate to.

Steam Punk - Bradford Industrial Museum

An unusual exhibition is running at the Bradford Industrial Museum at the moment with Victorian machinery alongside steampunk exhibits. I had a vague idea of what was meant by the term 'steampunk' before I went to the exhibition, it's a sort of fantasy world of futuristic gadgets and costumes but set in the Victorian period of steam power and early electrical gadgets. The picture of the phone is part of one of the exhibits, the thing is, there were still some of these phones in use when I was a lad, (I will have to stop using that phrase, it makes me sound like one of Monty Pythons Four Yorkshiremen http://youtu.be/Xe1a1wHxTyo ) which probably means I'm a museum piece myself.

Bradford Chorale - Bradford Industrial Museum

A Victorian Christmas market was held at the Bradford Industrial Museum today. Eighty stalls selling Christmas gifts were located around the museum with stallholders, staff and entertainers wearing Victorian costume. Members of the Bradford Chorale provided the Christmas carols, and beautifully sung they were too!

(Apologies for the quality of the picture, it was taken on my old compact camera which doesn't work well in low light).

Bradford's Last Trolleybus

This trolleybus was on display at the Bradford Industrial Museum earlier today, as you can see from the lettering it was the very last trolleybus to run on Bradford's roads when the service closed in 1972. If anyone reading this doesn't know what one of these vehicles is, well it's an electrically powered bus that draws its electricity from overhead wires using trolley poles. This particular bus is a bit posher than the ones I remember, it has a closing entrance door just behind the drivers partition. The ones I travelled on had an open platform at the rear, very useful if the bus was just pulling away, you could run and jump on, also very useful for showing people how clever you were by jumping off the bus as it was coming to a halt, my wife was a past master at this skill and now has a crown on one of her front teeth.