Bressingham Steam and Gardens

This article is about the steam museum and gardens in Norfolk. For the Norfolk village, see Bressingham.
The entrance to Bressingham Steam and Gardens
70013, Oliver Cromwell, at Bressingham, May 2004
The carousel in the gardens

Bressingham Steam & Gardens is a steam museum and gardens located at Bressingham (adjacent to a Wyevale garden centre), west of Diss in Norfolk, England. The site has several narrow gauge rail lines and a number of types of steam engines and vehicles in its collection and is also the home of the national Dad's Army exhibition.[1]

The Gardens

The gardens were established by Alan Bloom MBE at Bressingham Hall. He moved to Bressingham in 1946, after selling his previous 36-acre (15 ha) site at Oakington in Cambridgeshire to raise the capital for the 220 acres (89 ha) in Norfolk, where he hoped to be both a farmer and a nurseryman.[2] He was a plant expert of international renown, particularly in the field of hardy perennials. He laid out the Dell garden with its well-known island beds. His son, Adrian Bloom, laid out the Foggy Bottom garden.

Much of the site is given over to commercial horticulture. There is a garden centre on the site, trading as Blooms of Bressingham, although the nurseries themselves are not open to the public. Bressingham Gardens and Steam Museum is an independent charitable trust. Alan Bloom had wanted to create his own trust in 1967, to ensure that the collection would not be disbursed to pay for death duties, but the laws of the time made this difficult, and after five years of negotiation, the museum was nearly handed over to the Transport Trust. However, the legislation governing private museums was relaxed just before the handover in 1971, and Bloom was able to create his own Trust and thus retain control of it because the collection was of historical and educational importance.[2]

The Narrow Gauge Lines

There are three railway lines which take visitors around the gardens:

The site also contains a short standard gauge section of track and standard gauge footplate rides are sometimes available to visitors.

During 2013, a circular track of dual 7 1⁄4 in (184 mm) gauge and 5 in (127 mm) gauge was under construction. Once completed, there will be a total of six different gauges at Bressingham.

Standard gauge steam locomotives

Robert Stephenson and Hawthorns 0-4-0CT Millfield

Steam vehicles

A variety of steam vehicles are in the collection.[3]

Steam Engines Portable and others

Steam Rollers

Steam Tractors / Traction

Dad's Army Collection

The museum is the home of the national Dad's Army collection of vintage vehicles. These are located on a reconstruction of the High Street in the fictional Walmington-on-Sea beside the butcher's shop of Lance-Corporal Jones, Private Frazer's undertaker's shop and Captain Mainwaring's bank office.

The vehicles include Jones' van and the dust cart from the 1971 film, Mainwaring's staff car used in the episode The Captain's Car, the vintage fire engine used in Brain Versus Brawn and the steamroller 'Boxer' and traction engine 'Bertha' which appeared in other episodes.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Dads Army exhibition Retrieved 7 May 2009
  2. 1 2 Steam Engines at Bressingham, (1976), Alan Bloom, Faber and Faber, ISBN 0-571-10867-9
  3. ↑ Old Glory Magazine No.229 feb 2009 page 48 (Museum collections listing)

External links

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Coordinates: 52°23′05″N 1°03′26″E / 52.3846°N 1.0571°E / 52.3846; 1.0571

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