The Broseley Pipeworks are in an abandoned factory which was once home to one of the most prolific clay tobacco pipe makers in Britain, exporting all over the world. Explore this wonderfully preserved time capsule which has changed little since the workers left in the 1950s. Discover the ancient industry of clay tobacco pipe making. View a fascinating display of clay tobacco pipes including the Churchwarden and Dutch Long Straw pipes. Explore the factory and view the tools that were used. There is a video which provides an intriguing insight into the skilled art of clay tobacco pipe making. You should allow 1 hour for a visit to Broseley Pipeworks. The museum is wheelchair accessible, there is plenty of tactile exhibits and there are disabled toilets. Assistance dogs are welcome.
Opening Times : Daily 10:00 to 17:00
Tickets : Adults £5.15; Seniors £4.30; Children £3.85
The Coalbrookdale Museum of Iron is based in the village of Coalbrookdale in the Ironbridge Gorge, within a World Heritage Site, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. On display are: the remains of the revolutionary water powered blast furnace known as the Old Furnace; displays of domestic and decorative ironwork.; the Boy and Swan Fountain cast by the Coalbrookdale Company for the Great Exhibition of 1851; the Deerhound Table designed by sculptor John Bell for the Paris International Exhibition of 1855; cast iron Coalbrookdale Cooking Pots that introduced Abraham Darby I to the iron trade. The Old Furnace is where Abraham Darby I perfected the smelting of iron with coke instead of charcoal. It is a Grade I listed structure. The museum is wheelchair accessible, there are a few tactile exhibits and there are disabled toilets. Assistance dogs are welcome.
Opening Times : Daily 10:00 to 17:00
Tickets : Adults £8.85; Seniors £7.95; Children £5.65
The Coalport China Museum presents the history of Coalport China, a manufacturer of fine English chinaware which was based on the site between 1795 and 1926. As well as original examples of historic china, there are also demonstrations of traditional ceramic techniques, including flower making, pot throwing and china painting, and original industrial buildings including kilns to fire the pottery and the distinctive bottle-shaped chimneys of the two surviving bottle ovens. The collections include the official National Collections of Caughley and Coalport china as well as the Northumberland Vase, the largest piece of Coalport china ever produced. There is a hands-on workshop area where painting activities are provided and ceramic activities in the school holidays. The museum is wheelchair accessible, there are a few tactile exhibits and there are disabled toilets nearby. Assistance dogs are welcome.
Opening Times : Daily 10:00 to 17:00
Tickets : Adults £8.85; Seniors £7.95; Children £5.65
The Darby Houses comprise the adjacent properties of Dale House and Rosehill, both of which were built for members of the Darby family. Dale House was originally built in 1717 for Abraham Darby I and looks out over the Upper Furnace Pool whose outflow powered the blast furnace. This Abraham Darby married Abiah Darby and they had several children. Abraham and Abiah moved to their new house, Sunniside, in 1750. Dale House was enlarged by subsequent generations: in 1776 Abraham Darby II converted the attic into a third floor. During the 20th century it was converted into flats, which undermined the true character of the house, but has since been restored as much as possible to its 18th century appearance. Rosehill was built in about 1738 for Richard Ford, who married Abraham Darby I's eldest daughter, Mary. Richard was Clerk to the Coalbrookdale Company under Abraham I and later Manager of the Coalbrookdale Ironworks. In the mid 19th century the house was occupied by Abraham Darby III's youngest son Richard and his wife Maria and after his death by his daughter Rebecca until 1908. The house has been restored from an uninhabitable condition by architect Graham Winteringham and refurnished to recreate its 1850 appearance. Dale House is fully accessible (only the ground floor is open) and only the ground floor of Rosehill is accessible. Assistance dogs are welcome.
Opening Times : Daily 10:00 to 17:00
Tickets : Adults £5.50; Seniors £4.25; Children £3.75
Enginuity is an interactive design and technology centre in Coalbrookdale. The museum's exhibition floor is divided into four zones: Materials & Structures, Systems & Control, Energy and Design. Enginuity also offers workshops and interactive shows for school groups. During school holidays, the interactive shows are offered to the general public on varying themes. The shows currently comprise: Materials; Flight; Pneumatics; Impact; Protective clothing; Home-made toys; Forces; and Wacky wheels. There are a number of fascinating hands on activities. The museum is wheelchair accessible, there are plenty of tactile exhibits and there are disabled toilets. Assistance dogs are welcome.
Opening Times : Daily 10:00 to 17:00
Tickets : Adults £8.85; Seniors £7.95; Children £6.95
The Iron Bridge is a bridge that crosses the River Severn. Opened in 1781, it was the first arch bridge in the world to be made of cast iron, and was greatly celebrated after construction owing to its use of the new material. Abraham Darby I first smelted local iron ore with coke made from Coalbrookdale coal in 1709, and in the coming decades Shropshire became a centre for industry due to the low price of fuel from local mines. The River Severn was used as a key trading route, but it was also a barrier to travel around the Ironbridge Gorge, the nearest bridge being at Buildwas two miles away. The use of the river by boat traffic and the steep sides of the gorge meant that any bridge should ideally be of a single span, and sufficiently high to allow tall ships to pass underneath. The steepness and instability of the banks was problematic for building a bridge, and there was no point where roads on opposite sides of the river converged. The Iron Bridge was the first of its kind to be constructed, although not the first to be considered or the first iron bridge of any kind. An iron bridge was partly constructed at Lyons in 1755, but was abandoned for reasons of cost, and a 73 foot span wrought iron footbridge over an ornamental waterway was erected in Yorkshire in 1769.
The site, adjacent to where a ferry had run between Madely and Benthall, was chosen for its high approaches on each side and the relative solidity of the ground. The Act of Parliament described how the bridge was to be built from a point in Benthall parish near the house of Samuel Barnett to a point on the opposite shore near the house of Thomas Crumpton. Pritchard died on 21 December 1777 in his tower-house at Eyton on Severn, only a month after work had begun, having been ill for over a year. The masonry and abutments were constructed between 1777 and 1778, and the ribs were lifted into place in the summer of 1779. The nascent bridge first spanned the river on 2 July 1779, and it was opened to traffic on 1 January 1781. There is an exhibition detailing the history in the Tollhouse which is open every weekend during local school holidays.
The Jackfield Tile Museum lies in the village of Jackfield, near Broseley, on the south bank of the River Severn in the Ironbridge Gorge. The museum is housed in a decorative tile factory building, the former works of Craven Dunnill and Company, that is still used to produce tiles, particularly encaustic tiles. It presents the history of the British decorative tile industry between 1840 and 1960, the period in which this factory and that of Maw & Co nearby played an important part in this industry. Jackfield is one of the oldest known ceramic production centres in Shropshire, a tradition dating back to the 16th century. The Thursfield family settled in Jackfield during the early 18th century; Jackfield wares are attributed to the family. They have recreated an Edwardian Tube Station, a pub and a children's hospital ward to illustrate the uses of the tiles.
Discover tile decorating techniques including encaustic, embossed, dust press and tube-lined and wander through the original gas-lit trade show room. You can see the Craven Dunnill factory in operation on certain days and design and create your own unique tile at one of the creative workshops (See the Events Calendar). Take a look inside Fusion, home to a number of fantastic designers and makers. Join in a factory tour every Wednesday at 11.00am. Accessible lifts are available to all floors in the main museum building. The rest of the site is accessible from the tarmac and block paved yard. Tactile displays are at hand throughout the museum. Assistance Dogs are welcome on site and into all areas. Seating is available inside the Jackfield Tile Museum and in the outside yard area. Accessible Toilets are situated in the yard area across from the main museum building and are fully accessible with side transfer and support rails.
Opening Times : Daily 10:00 to 17:00
Tickets : Adults £8.85; Seniors £7.95; Children £5.65
The River Severn was a major transport route, especially before the building of the railway. Severn trows were used to bring raw materials to the forges of the Gorge and to take the finished goods away. At this time, before the management of the river by weirs, water levels in the Severn were highly seasonal. During the summer the river was too low to be navigable and so finished goods were held in warehouses until there was once again enough water for passage. The site is at the Wharfage, just West of the village of Ironbridge. This location is also the confluence of the main manufacturing area of Coalbrookdale, and its non-navigable river, with the valley of the Severn. Around 1840 a warehouse was constructed here for the Coalbrookdale Company, to plans by the architect Samuel Cookson. Its architectural style is highly distinctive and most unusual for a warehouse. It follows the Gothic Revival architecture recently made fashionable by Pugin and already made use of locally for St Luke's Church, Ironbridge. The style of the warehouse owes far more to Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill than to Pugin. The parapet of the roof is crenellated at each end and decorated with pinnacles. The Eastward, riverward face is extended with a church-like apse, flanked by two narrow towers decorated with cross-shaped arrow loops, but actually hiding chimneys. Construction is of local red brick, with yellow brick dressing. The main roof is simple and warehouse-like, comprising four tiled bays with simple gable ends. Most of the walls are blind, with only high windows in the gables for security and the walls between supported by buttresses. The apse extension, originally an office, has tall lancet windows to give light, and reinforcing the church-like atmosphere of that facade.
Flooding has long been a problem for this stretch of the river. Flooding to the level of the warehouse is an annual occurrence. The worst of the floods is recorded by a painted line inside the building, almost at the top of the windows. The museum's main function is to explain the overall picture of the Ironbridge Gorge sites. Films and interactive displays help to do this. There are relatively few exhibits specific to the warehouse building itself. Examples are displayed of the kind of iron wares that were cast by the Coalbrookdale Company, and that would have been shipped through the warehouse. The centrepiece of the museum is a large diorama, 12 metres (40 ft) long. This represents the whole of the Gorge, as it was at its industrial height. The diorama represents the visit of King George III to the Iron Bridge itself, in 1796. The bridge, opened in 1781, was then 15 years old. This was the period of the Napoleonic Wars and the First Coalition. At this time Britain was still at war with France, although not as actively engaged as it would be shortly. The industries of the Gorge were militarily important, although under the Quaker ironmasters of the Darby family the foundries of Coalbrookdale were not directly engaged in the casting of cannon, as other ironworks such as the Calcutts Ironworks in Jackfield and the more famous Scottish Carron Company were.
In the early part of the first industrial revolution the Gorge contained a larger number of smaller furnaces than it would in later years. Many establishments were small and in particular there were a large number of shallow bell pits extracting coal. These used horse gins for winding, models of which can be seen. Steam power is rare at this time, only a few of the larger furnaces having steam blowing engines. One of the largest sections of the diorama is the 350 yards long Hay Inclined Plane of the Shropshire Canal, opened in 1792. Although mostly gravity worked, this also used an early Heslop patent rotative beam engine to winch canal tubs from the canal basin at the top. At the foot of the inclined plane is the short Coalport Canal and the newly opened Coalport China manufactory (1795) with its four bottle kilns. Although the museum is otherwise one of the smaller ones of the Trust, the diorama and other displays here are useful at the start of a larger visit as an overview and context for the other sites. Accessible toilets with side transfer and support rails are situated on the car park about 22 metres away from the museum entrance. The site is wheelchair accessible. Assistance dogs are welcome. The small ‘Lady Chapel’ within the museum is only accessible by steps but can be viewed at ground level.
Opening Times : Daily 10:00 to 17:00
Tickets : Adults £4.50; Seniors £3.55; Children £3.15
The Tar Tunnel is located on the north bank of the River Severn in the Ironbridge Gorge at Coalport. Miners struck a gushing spring of natural bitumen, a black treacle-like substance, when digging a canal tunnel for the Coalport Canal in 1787. The plan, proposed by William Reynolds, was to connect the canal alongside the River Severn to the lower galleries of the mines below the Blists Hill area. After digging some 3,000ft (almost 1 km) into the hill the canal project was abandoned in favour of bitumen extraction. The tunnel was a great curiosity in the eighteenth century and bitumen still oozes gently from the brick walls today. Bitumen's chief commercial use at the time was to treat and weatherproof ropes and caulk wooden ships, but small amounts were processed and bottled as 'British oil', a remedy for rheumatism.
After the canal project was abandoned the Hay Inclined Plane was built instead, its base being alongside the canal basin. After a few years of mining the bitumen supply was depleted and the tunnel was used for its original purpose, to move product from the mine systems of the area onto the canal ways. Visitors are provided with hard hats and may enter the first 300ft (roughly 100 metres) of the brick-lined tunnel as far as an iron gate. Electric lighting is provided. The entrance is wheelchair accessible. There are no toilet facilities on site. Assistance dogs are welcome. There is little for the visually impaired other than to feel the walls.
Opening Times : Daily 10:00 to 17:00
Tickets : Adults £3.40; Seniors £2.95; Children £2.40
Location : Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, Coalbrookdale, Telford, Telford and Wrekin TF8 7DQ
Transport: Telford Central (National Rail) then bus. Bus Routes : Gorge Connect and ICPR (Bank Holiday Weekends) OR 9 ,18, 86 and 894 stop close by.
Opening Times : Daily 10:00 to 17:00
Tickets Passport: Adults £25.00; Seniors £20.00; Children £15.00
Tel: 01952 432405
