Bracken Hall Countryside Centre and Museum is a children's museum, natural history education centre and nature centre established in 1989 at Bracken Hall on the edge of Baildon Moor, close to Shipley Glen in West Yorkshire, England.
In 2013 the Bradford Council removed their funding of the museum. The Friends of Bracken Hall worked to gather support in order to reopen the museum, and whilst the centre was planned to re-open in late 2015, it was finally re-opened to the public in April 2016 with the help of Baildon Town Council.
Site layout
Museum building and front garden
Building
This c. 1890s Yorkshire gritstone building was once a bailiff's house, then a farm house, and it still has the original big, old, panelled front door. It is of the traditional rural, symmetrical, four-up, four-down domestic design which was common in the Georgian era and continued throughout the 19th century. This type of house has two rooms each side of the front door, stairs in the middle leading back from the front door, and two upstairs bedrooms each side of the stairwell, with a 19th-century dressing room above the front hall. The walls between front and back rooms are load-bearing, and supported by the two chimneys, which allow fireplaces in all eight main rooms. Bradford City Council has built an extra ground-floor room onto the left hand side, and this contains the museum entrance door and reception. The two original downstairs front rooms are now the Archaeology room and Exhibition room. The public cannot see the two downstairs back rooms, the stairs or the upstairs rooms, which are now accessed from behind the reception desk; therefore the public has access to just a quarter of the original building. The back door leads from the new entrance room to the back garden and the toilets.
Museum layout
This children's museum
and countryside centre specialises in interactive displays for all ages, indoor and out. When the museum is open, the public can walk through the ground floor rooms of the museum, and through the back and front gardens which are dedicated to wildlife discovery. The whole site and surrounding moor and glen are used for public groups on Wild Wednesdays and on guided walks, and for school groups when the museum is closed to the public: all these groups by appointment.
Front garden
This changes with the seasons. In May and June there are many wild flowers, including green alkanet, herb Robert and creeping buttercup. There are bird feeders which attract various finches and tits, and an animal hutch for a rabbit or guinea pig. There is a double gate so that the animal could occasionally be safely let out to graze under staff supervision.
Entrance room
Due to the vigorously interactive nature of children, and the transient nature of wildlife, some of the following displays will be regularly replaced with other items of interest.
Video microscope
In the Entrance room next to Reception is a six-foot-high, interactive video microscope. You place a dish of natural objects (for example houseflies) on the lighted tray at the bottom, and move it around until it shows in the video screen at the top. The tray is at child-height to enable youngsters to take part. On the screen a housefly looks bigger than your hand, so that its details might be observed easily.
Fishtanks and wormery
Along the back wall is a gallery of fishtanks, containing (depending on availability) animals such as tadpoles, bullheads, goldfish and water fleas. In the far corner of the back wall is a wormery.
Honeycomb and remains of wasp nest
On the wall opposite Reception there used to be an indoor beehive with an observation panel for the children, but it was dismantled due to colony collapse disorder. It has been replaced with an information board about bees, and a honeycomb for the children to handle. The wall-display explains bee hierarchy, bee behaviour and hive structure. There is also an information board about wasps. Like the bee board, this board explains behaviour and nest structure, but it also mentions the wasp's usefulness in organic pest control. Below it are the remains of a wasp nest so that the children can compare the papery and waxy textures of the nest and honeycomb.
Computer nature guide and ID-by-touch box
This computer uses a Dangerous Creatures CD-ROM, a program for children which allows them to learn about wildlife outside the UK while being entertained. It is situated halfway along the wall opposite Reception. Near the computer is an identification-by-touch display of natural objects.