Black Country visitor centre in Dudley evokes industrial heritage

Looking down the hill from Napier Clarke’s new visitor centre at the Black Country Living Museum (BCLM) in Dudley, a new town is rising like those you see along the HS2 construction line from London to Birmingham. Tall streets of terraced buildings made from red bricks peer above the hoarding – only the slope of the site affords the view. Behind, everything is seemingly new, uniform, straight-edged, vivid and shiny.

The BCLM is a West Midlands institution. You would be hard pressed to find a child that has grown up in the region who hasn’t been there. Over the past 10 years its ‘cut’ (canal arm) has been beamed onto television screens around the world in Peaky Blinders, as the location for some of the gangsters’ grubbiest activities. Danny Whizz-Bang is shot ‘dead’ on the canal bank, falling straight into a passing barge. 

This period crime drama is credited with creating an explosion of interest in Birmingham and the surrounding industrial towns and cities. Visitors to the Black Country Living Museum grew by nearly a third between 2014 and 2019. Themed nights on the show sell out within 24 hours.

The development at the base of the valley is part of the museum’s £30 million ‘Forging ahead’ investment, £12.5 million of which came from the Heritage Lottery Fund, among others. Like the series itself, this scheme extends the story of the West Midlands from the 1930s into the 1960s, almost up to the museum’s own creation in the 1970s. 

The project involves relocating existing buildings, rebuilding others that have already been lost and fabricating some from scratch. In the mix is a new 1960s town centre, entirely designed by Glancy Nicholls Architects. The first phase of works will increase the number of buildings in the collection by 22. The focus is extremely local – just the buildings, places and people constrained by the boundaries of Dudley, Sandwell, Wolverhampton and Walsall. These are the stories that within 50 years transformed a green and pleasant land to coal mining, slag heaps and other heavy industry in glass, brickmaking, iron and steel. There are 48 former mines on the museum’s 10.5ha site alone.

This aspect of the project has consumed much of the £30 million. It’s success won’t be clear until the whole thing has had a bit more soot and dirt slung at it. It forms part of a masterplan brought about in 2014 by BCLM boss Andrew Lovett, the museum’s second director in its nearly 50-year history and also chair of West Midlands Regional Tourism Board. The investment’s other mission was to reorient the visitor arrival experience, including the entrance building contained behind the reclaimed facade of a Victorian bath house on Tipton Road. The new visitor centre took £7.36 million of the budget, and is our viewing point over the pit, mill and street below. On a heavily clouded grey day, the atmosphere is packed with nostalgic glory.

Visitors now arrive even further up the hill on a plateau towards the centre of Dudley, where the metro line will stop, away from the main road. Winding down from a new car park, surrounded by the dense trees on one side and views of Castle Hill in the distance , visitors approach the museum’s collection by almost stepping back into a pre-industrial rural landscape. Country paths cross the view between the trees. Slowly the museum and its locality reveal themselves – the Ketley patterned paver trim to the path, the small, pitched roof, red-brick Brooks Entrance Building is first to greet you. Then you pass into a circus with tram cables above, bordered by vehicle sheds and the new visitor centre that completes the circle. By now you are full into the red and black of industry.

Napier Clarke came to the project in 2017 via an open competition entered by 26 practices. The studio was then only two years old, but co-director Steven Clarke had grown up in Yardley, Birmingham, and the trustees who did the interviewing, says Lovett, ‘picked up on the strength and seriousness of intent of the team Napier Clarke put together’. The brief was that the design should be contemporary, inspire funding, cope with 5000 people per day and ‘herald the site, look over it, be bigger and more spacious’, continues Lovett. 

Until then the broad proposal for the project set by the masterplan had been a single 1500m² volume. Napier Clarke’s major move was to bring down its scale by splitting the building into three repeated and adjoined pitched roof lengths that would use the same materials and structure to keep costs down. The gable ends stagger around the tram circle, their zinc-clad, standing seam, steel apexes opened by glazing at both ends like hooded tram sheds. The design is an interpretation of the historic fabric of the sheds and workshops on display elsewhere around the museum.

Visitors enter via the central volume into a spacious atrium. Inside, the structure is exposed, revealing a deliberately minimalist and elegant engineering. Diagonal rafters slot together at the ridge beam and edge purlins self-supported, avoiding the need for nuts, bolts and welding. Every other section between the rafters is infilled with wood fibre acoustic panelling or bare-faced ply, giving the ceiling a bunting effect celebratory tone. In the volume to the left is a ‘shopfront’ exhibition window designed as a taster for what is inside the museum, plus offices, WCs, kitchen and a café whose walls almost touch the adjacent woodland. To the right is a large retail space, also fitted out using plywood. A broad cantilevered terrace projects beyond the central and right-hand volumes and starts to connect to the reconstructed Black Country landscape down the hill. You can survey the whole site at leisure on the deck.

At the centre of the middle shed two triangular rooflights, cut between steel diagonals, bring light in and down a central stair to the lower ground level, not visible from the entrance circus. Built into the slope, the textures intentionally change here from lightweight to heavy, dark brick – replicated externally. This level takes visitors out into the open air museum. Now being used as a ticketing hall (it was decided a reception desk on the upper level was not necessary), it will become an exhibition space.

Environmentally, the steel frame was not chosen for its sustainability, although the building is naturally ventilated through its clerestory front and rear-facing windows, vented via chimney stacks. It is entirely electric, powered by air source heat pumps. There is little plasterboard, to minimise wastage; instead, internal walls are finished with light grey standing seam metal panels. 

Walking back up towards the visitor centre from the cut at the end of the day, the building is lit up, its dark outline and gable windows spectacular against the setting sun sky. The building is contemporary, vernacular, inventive, meaningful and yet simple. Its architecture may feel familiar, and that’s the point. Yet it seems there is nothing of its scale and quality anywhere nearby; Lovett gets frequent requests to hire it for other purposes, just like the rescued canal arm used by the Peaky Blinders.

It could become a beacon for a flourishing West Midlands future, capturing the essence of its setting and pragmatism of its people – even on the design team – that produced such a fascinating landscape. The accomplishment of the new visitor centre’s design and execution also lightens any fears for the development down the hill. Instead I’m excited for the future schoolchildren for whom the building helps give a sense of value and possibility.

IN NUMBERS

GIFA 1,530m² 
Construction cost (including car park and external works) £7.36m
Annual CO₂ emissions 35.7kg/m²