ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1982 we finally took possession of a late-nineteenth-century end-terrace house in Madeley, Shropshire. Madeley is a small town, but designated part of Telford, ‘the birthplace of industry’. Nearby is the Ironbridge Gorge, one of many places in Britain that lays claim to being the very spot where, in 1709, ‘the world’s industrial revolution began’. For the past decade Ironbridge has been a regular haunt of ours for family outings from the West Midlands: a Bank Holiday mecca and the object of innumerable photographs in our household’s collection. In one sense our interest in the area exactly reflects the most recent phase of the increasing lure of historical tourism in general, and in the West Midlands the gradual ascendancy of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust (hereafter the Trust) in particular.
