Qualla: Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings

Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Goodwin, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1962 a 15th-century timber-framed merchant's house in Bromsgrove was about to be demolished. A group of local people - architects, historians, schoolteachers - thought this was a poor idea, and they did the only thing left to do: they took the building apart, oak peg by oak peg, marked every joint and timber, and waited. By 1967 they had found a field, raised some money, and re-erected the merchant's house at Stoke Heath on the edge of Bromsgrove. They called the new site Avoncroft, and it became the first open-air museum in England - second in the United Kingdom only to St Fagans in Wales. The merchant's house is still here. So are around thirty other buildings, all rescued from somewhere else, all reassembled where they would not otherwise have stood.

Image: Mike Goodwin | CC BY-SA 2.0

Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings: The Greiners and the Town House

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. The merchant's house - now known simply as the Town House - was dismantled, restored and reconstructed by Gunolt Greiner, a German-born craftsman, and his son Francis. They worked to a rule of strict honesty: where the original details were known they reproduced them; where they ...

Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings: Thirty Buildings, Seven Centuries

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MrAvoncroft, CC BY 4.0. The collection at Avoncroft now runs to more than thirty structures spanning over 700 years. There is a chain-makers' workshop and a cell block, a counting house and an earth closet, an ice house and a 16th-century threshing barn. The granary stands on staddle stones to keep the ...

Image: MrAvoncroft | CC BY 4.0

Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings: The Arcon V and the New Guesten Hall

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two buildings on the site are easy to overlook and hold the most surprising stories. The first is a prefab - an Arcon V, one of the emergency post-war houses that were thrown up in their thousands after the Second World War to replace bombed-out homes. This particular one came fr...

Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings: Britain's Phone Boxes, All in One Place

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bluedalmatian, CC BY-SA 3.0. Avoncroft also holds the UK's National Telephone Kiosk Collection - the largest single gathering of British phone boxes in the country. The familiar red K2 from 1924, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott. The K6, the smaller red box that proliferated in 1936. The K8, the K3 in concret...

Image: Bluedalmatian | CC BY-SA 3.0

Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings: Rescue as a Philosophy

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Every building at Avoncroft was moved to save it. Some had been threatened by road schemes. Some had been condemned as unfit. Some had simply fallen so far out of use that demolition was cheaper than repair. Taken individually each rescue is a small story; taken together they mak...

Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0