Sjøgata is Northern Norway's longest continuous run of nineteenth-century wooden houses and wharves, a working waterfront that simply never got demolished or burned. The oldest building on it, Fru Haugans Hotel, goes back to 1794 and is still taking guests. Much of the streetscape is now protected. In 2004 the Sjøgata environment received the Olavsrosa, the mark awarded to Norwegian heritage attractions that meet a certain standard of authenticity, and the street has become the town's principal attraction - restaurants, galleries, workshops and museum rooms occupying buildings that were built for salt fish, timber and general trade. Walking it, you notice that the wharves still lean out over the water. They were not designed for tourists. They were designed for boats coming alongside.

The Helgeland Museum was formally established on 19 March 2003, the end point of a consolidation that had begun two years earlier, and it is best understood as a solution to a geography problem. Helgeland covers roughly 18,832 square kilometres and holds about 85,000 people, scattered across four towns and a long tail of islands, fjord-heads and valleys. No single community out there can support a conservator, a textile specialist, a building archaeologist and an archivist. So the foundation pools them. Eighteen municipalities collaborate on the operation; the museum runs a group of eighteen museums and building collections across them, with about 49 permanent staff. The concept, in the organisation's own words, is to distribute expertise across Helgeland, so that a specialist in one place works for every place.

The list of divisions reads like a survey of how people have made a living on this coast. There is the Petter Dass Museum at Alstahaug, built around the priest and poet who served that parish from 1689 to 1707 and wrote Nordlands Trompet. There is the eider duck house on Vega, in an archipelago inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2004 for a frugal way of life built on fishing and the harvesting of eider down - a tradition in which the work, and the expertise, was largely women's. There are old trading posts at Nordvika on Dønna and the Falch site on Rødøy, open-air museums at Velfjord, Herøy, Sømna, Vevelstad and Grane, the Rana Museum inland, the Hemnes Museum, a lensmann's farm at Hattfjelldal, and the wartime coastal battery at Grønsvik in Lurøy. Fishing, farming, trade, faith, war and down.

The Vefsn Museum, the division on the museum's own doorstep, tells the story of how Mosjøen became the first town on Helgeland in 1875, which is a shorter story than most Norwegian town histories and a stranger one. The place went from a strand of traders and craftsmen to a chartered trading town, a town of officials, and eventually a garrison town in about a generation, largely on the back of a timber boom driven by English capital. Alongside the permanent material the museum runs rotating cultural-history exhibitions and gallery space for contemporary work through the year. It is a small operation, but it sits inside the buildings its subject matter is about, which not every museum can claim.