Weald and Downland Living Museum, Open-air museum in Singleton, United Kingdom.
Weald and Downland Living Museum is an open-air museum in Singleton that displays over 50 historic buildings from Southeast England across 40 acres (16 hectares). The collection includes farms, houses, workshops and a working watermill that represent rural life from medieval times through the 19th century.
The museum was founded in 1970 to rescue threatened historic buildings from rural Southeast England and preserve them for future generations. The structures were carefully dismantled at their original sites and rebuilt on the museum grounds.
Craftspeople work with period tools inside the reconstructed buildings, showing visitors how people made everyday objects in earlier centuries. The names of many houses come from their original locations in Sussex, Kent and other counties across Southeast England.
The museum opens daily from 10:30 to 18:00 and offers designated parking areas along with a cafe serving local refreshments. Paths between buildings are mostly unpaved, so sturdy footwear is recommended for exploring the expansive grounds.
The Gridshell building from 2002 uses innovative curved timber construction to house the conservation workshops and rural life collection. Its curved form was created by bending a flat timber grid into the desired double curvature during the building phase.
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