We have been vaguely aware of the Milestones museum‘s existance for quite a while now, seeing the signs for it every time we drove through Basingstoke. We’ve had no compelling reason to visit it until recently when we were looking for somewhere engaging to take our young granddaughter this holiday.
Milestones is living museum that recreates streets and buildings from about the 1940’s and 50’s era. It is similar to the York Museum which has a Victorian street recreated there. The museum buiding itself looks like a huge aircraft hanger and you enter at the very top onto a mezzanine overlooking the roofs of the buildings which is pretty cool.
You decend down the stairs to ground level onto a cobble paved roadway. The streets are wide, much wider than they would have been in reality, and today pretty empty. Despite this being school holidays there weren’t too many people there which allowed us to explore the place in peace.
With a few exceptions most of the shops are nothing more the fronts displaying as they would have been there when they were open. Although there was a nice teddy bear museum with a hidden space behind where you could read books which was great. Another nice touch was that where possible local names of establishments had been used and there were a large number of vehicles from local manufacturer, Thornycroft. Everything there was beautifully preserved and laid out.
However, at three our granddaughter was a little too young to really appreciate the place but what she did love was an old bus that you could go on and sit inside. She had lots of fun there and we had to return to it several times to allow her to pretend to drive us to various locations. It certainly caught her imagination.
As discussed in the post about the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard Milestones too allows you to return as many times as you like in the next 12 months so I think we’ll be coming back to see if we can do more than just go on the bus!
