Weald and Downland Living Museum, West Dean, West Sussex

During our recent visit to Brighton and Hove, we spent a day at the Weald and Downland Living Museum.  The aim of the museum has been to rescue representative examples of vernacular buildings from SE England and as well as the buildings, the museum holds a comprehensive collection of 16,500 artefacts that includes building parts, tools and samples relating to rural trades and crafts and agriculture, transport and domestic life.  These reflect the buildings that have been rescued, how they were constructed and the activities of those who lived and worked in them.

The museum was largely the creation of Roy Armstrong who believed that an intimate knowledge of one’s community led to a better understanding of the wider world.  He had been appointed historical adviser to Arundel Museum in 1963, he co-founded the Wealden Buildings Study Group, he was a founder member of the Vernacular Architecture Group and he wrote a History of Sussex that went to 4 editions.

It was the destruction of medieval buildings to make way for Crawley New Town which set in motion the creation of the museum.  The idea had first been discussed at a conference on timber-framed buildings of the Weald in 1965 and the following year a committee was set up to promote an ‘open air museum of the Weald’.

Threatened buildings were freely available but the problem was to find a suitable site on which to reconstruct them.  After a few false starts, in 1967, Edward James offered the committee 40 acres of his estate at West Dean in West Sussex in the South Downs National Park where he had set up a foundation to nurture arts and crafts.  The museum opened in 1970 and now has a collection of 50 historic buildings covering the period from 950 AD to the 20th century together with tools and artifacts, period gardens, traditional farm animals and a mill pond.

The buildings range from a reconstruction of an Anglo-Saxon Hall House dating from around 950 AD to medieval houses, toll houses, market halls, 19th century cottages, farmhouses, barns, stables, a water mill, a bakehouse, a dairy, brick drying sheds, etc, etc.  The working buildings represent the trades and crafts of the inhabitants of the region whether milling flour in the watermill, producing bricks in the brick drying shed, producing butter and cheese in the dairy or baking bread in the bakehouse.

There is also a building that covered a saw pit where a large log of timber was positioned over the pit so that two men using a long, two-handled saw could cut it into planks, a technique that is still in use in West Africa (see my article on this web-site about the Bo Teachers College Project in Sierra Leone for a photo of two men cutting up a log using a seven foot long, two-handled saw).

There are a number of new buildings on the site.  The Downland Gridshell Building, designed by Edward Cullinan Architects and completed in 2002, is a long, undulating building enclosed by a double-curvature shell constructed of slender green oak laths.  The upper level houses the museum’s conservation workshop and the lower level the museum’s collection of rural tools and artifacts.  A very interesting building but unfortunately, we could not get in as it was being used as the venue for a wedding reception.

The other new buildings are the Visitors’ Centre buildings that were designed by ABIR Architects and completed in 2017.  The Visitors’ Centre forms the entrance to the museum and contains an exhibition space, gift shop, café, and flexible community spaces in three buildings centred on the existing mill pond.  The Centre is built around a central public gathering space that extends from the museum entrance to the mill pond and the grouping of the buildings was inspired by the traditional clustering of farmstead buildings.

The architects have stated that the construction techniques used in the new buildings were intended to celebrate the evolution of timber framed/timber clad architecture as well as showcasing the advances made in timber construction.   The buildings are mainly constructed of cross-laminated timber wall panels which minimised their carbon footprint and allowed for off-site manufacture.  The larger spaces such as the café and the shop utilise interesting internal structures of green oak posts and beams with stainless steel connectors.  Internal and external cladding is of timber with wooden shingles on the roofs.  The buildings are simple, very nicely detailed and laid out and do not try to compete with the traditional buildings on the site

The first gallery of photos are of the Visitors’ Centre and the second gallery has photos of some of the reclaimed buildings.

Visitors Centre

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Reclaimed Buildings

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Architecture in Developing Countries: A Resource

The design and construction of appropriate, low-cost buildings for education and health in rural areas of the developing world.

Nigel Wakeham is an architect who lived for 23 years in Southern and West Africa and the SW Pacific working on education, health and other projects. He has since worked for over 20 years as a consultant for national governments and agencies such as the World Bank, DFID, ADB and AfDB on the implementation of the construction components of education and health projects in many countries in the developing world.​

​The objective of this website will be to provide the benefit of more than 45 years of experience of working in developing countries to architects and other construction professionals involved in the design and construction of appropriate, low-cost buildings for education and health. It will provide reference material from the projects that Nigel has worked on and technical information on the design, construction and maintenance of educational and health facilities and other relevant topics and these will be added to from time to time.

I am happy to be contacted by anyone requiring further information on any of the projects or resources referred to in this website or by anyone wishing to discuss work possibilities.

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