Beamish Museum — 1900s Colliery Stanley · County Durham · England

The Beamish Museum site near Stanley in County Durham sits within the former Durham coalfield, and the 1900s Colliery exhibit draws directly on that industrial landscape. The one structure original to the museum's ground is the Mahogany Drift Mine, opened on the site in about 1855 to extract coal. After closing, the drift was brought back into use in 1921 to transport coal from Beamish Park Drift to Beamish Chophill Colliery. When the museum assembled its colliery exhibit the Mahogany Drift was incorporated, opening to visitors in 1979. It offers guided underground tours and includes a winding engine, a short section of trackway, and a mine office as part of the display.

The two structures that dominate the surface colliery exhibit — the stone winding engine house and the red-painted wooden heapstead — were not original to the site but were relocated from other local collieries. The engine house and its winding engine came from Beamish Chophill Colliery, also known as Beamish Second Pit, which had been closed by the National Coal Board in 1962. Most of its buildings were subsequently demolished. Museum founder Frank Atkinson intervened to have both the engine and the tower spot listed to prevent their demolition. After a protracted process to obtain the necessary permissions for moving a listed structure, the tower and engine were dismantled and reconstructed at the museum, work being completed in 1976. The winding engine was built in 1855 by J&G Joicey of Newcastle to an 1800 design by Phineas Crowther. It was still in active use at Chophill at the time of closure and is the sole surviving example of its type from the Northern Coalfield. Both the engine and its enclosing house are listed. Inside the engine house, a smaller jack engine is housed at the rear; such engines were used to lift heavy equipment and, in deep mines, to act as a relief winding engine.

The wooden heapstead — the structure in which coal was weighed, screened, and loaded onto railway wagons — was relocated from Ravensworth Park Mine in Gateshead. It is typical of the smaller collieries of west Durham. Outside, next to the heapstead, stands a sinking engine brought to the museum from Silksworth Colliery in 1971. Built by Burlington's of Sunderland in 1868, it is the sole surviving example of its kind. Sinking engines were used during shaft construction; it is believed the Silksworth engine was retained at that colliery because it was powerful enough to serve as a backup winding engine.

The colliery exhibit also includes a lamp cabin opened in 2009, recreating a typical colliery lamp cabin of the Edwardian period. Standard and narrow gauge railways serve the colliery yard. A larger engine shed presented as Beamish Engine Works is a reconstruction of the engine shed that formerly stood at Beamish 2nd Pit. A Power House on the south-eastern corner of the colliery site was brought from Houghton Colliery. The museum's colliery railway holds a collection of industrial steam locomotives and chaldron wagons, the traditional regional type of colliery rolling stock.

The museum was established following a working party set up in 1966, and opened to visitors on its present site in 1972, the first regional open-air museum in England. The winding engine house reconstruction was completed in 1976. The museum was named European Museum of the Year in 1986. The colliery exhibit is presented as representing operations under James Joicey and Co., managed by William Severs, consistent with the Edwardian period the museum depicts.