The rain has stopped! The rain has finally stopped! And the weather forecast says it’ll stay dry this weekend. We have got to get out of the house and go somewhere.

And that’s the thrilling flashback covering the backstory behind a quick scroll around and zoom in on a map to find a place we’d never visited – in fact, a place we’d never heard of before – less than an hour away from our home: Amberley Museum. Open air? Fresh air will do us good! Industrial heritage? We like a bit of that! Vintage electronics? You can’t beat a bit of retro equipment perusing! Used as a filming location for a James Bond movie? Well, if we weren’t sold before then we are now! On a cold but clear Saturday we headed off.

Amberley Museum is north of Arundel, somewhere we’ve visited numerous times (Arundel has a lovely castle and very attractive gardens), so getting to Amberley was very simple. We’d checked the map before and it wasn’t immediately obvious where parking was located for the museum but as you approach the destination it’s all quite clear; parking is within the grounds of the nearby Amberley railway station. The free parking section reserved for museum visitors is locked up outside museum hours.

We had a pleasant chat with a very friendly member of staff at the ticket office for the museum who handed us a map and explained the best way to wander around the site’s acres of land, told us about the free bus and train rides running throughout the day, let us know that craftspeople and volunteers varied like the weather but you could count on at least three buildings where locals would be able to demonstrate old skills or answer questions, and then pointed out that all the communications were down and taking card payments electronically would involve some old-school shenanigannery. While that felt almost perfectly in tune with the heritage feel of the museum anyway we actually had enough cash on us to forego this necessity, helped by the January discount that the museum runs if you know the password. You’ll have to look online for that if you’re planning to visit in the off-season months.

Through the ticket office and gift shop then turning left presented us with some attractive brick buildings. In addition to public toilets at this spot there was also a brewery display, ironmonger’s shop, machine shop, print shop, and a shed housing some road steam and stationary steam engines. The print shop was the largest of the buildings and was a working one so if you want a custom print of some description to take away as a souvenir then this is the place to visit.

The building housing the TV and radio exhibition was next around Amberley in a roughly clockwise direction. This was jam-packed with everything from the early days of broadcasting entertainment and information over the air with displays dedicated to microphones and wartime communications to shelves of radio units in wooden or plastic casings and increasingly decorative styling to television sets and video recorders from the earliest days upwards. We liked the 1927 Royal Doulton loudspeaker in the form of a parrot “to make the technology more acceptable to the lady of the house” mostly for what that said about social attitudes of the time.

Art deco designs on the vintage radio sets were particularly beautiful but some of the early television sets with their tiny, curved screens were the standout pieces for me with their anachronistic futuristic appeals from the distant past.

About halfway through the TV and radio exhibition building there was a reproduction of an amateur radio room. We got talking to the volunteer nearby for several minutes and in the conversation we learned that the reproduction was effectively a mishmash of three genuine setups. I loved the very obviously amateur feel of this – the exposed wires, the spare equipment – but also the very real sense that someone had lived and loved this life – the mounted ashtrays, the kettle with its terrifyingly dangerous-looking wiring – and that feeling of dedication was almost tangible.

At the ticket office we’d been told that there might be a Tesla Coil demonstration in the Electricity Hall at the far end of the museum grounds at half past the hour and that excited us. We looked at the map and looked at the bus stop near where we’d exited the TV and radio exhibition and figured we’d take the bus as it was due to leave and we didn’t think we’d be able to walk to the hall in time. As already mentioned, there is a bus that runs around the site and there is also a narrow gauge railway running a train too so if you have mobility issues then these can alleviate some of your walking difficulties. Transportation is free and regular so you’re also able to ride both forms of transport as much as you like. We were the only people on the bus and about sixty seconds after setting off it had reached its destination as we hadn’t really grasped the map’s scale so we probably could have walked after all. But who doesn’t like a bus ride?

The first thing we did inside the Electricity Hall was head to the Tesla Coil to see if there would be problems viewing it or filming it. Viewing it, no. Filming it, yes, on account of the sign indicating that there would be no demonstrations on the day of our visit. That’s just the risk you take and we wouldn’t let it spoil our visit because we hadn’t even known it would be here before arriving. We shall have to return to Amberley Museum at some point and see if we can get lucky.

There are two sections to the Electricity Hall. The first section we entered contained a wide range of more industrial uses of electricity; engines, displays, power indicators, plus vehicles including electric bikes, Sinclair C5s, and a ridiculously cute Enfield 8000 Electric Car.

The second section of the hall was more interesting to us and if you’ve got children or have the mind of a child then it’s far more entertaining – and educational – too. This was dedicated to consumer uses of electricity so there were displays of fridges, freezers, vacuum cleaners, heated baths, cookers, washers, dryers, and personal electrical equipment for home use. Moreover, there were lots of interactive elements here, lots of buttons to push, levers to pull, handles to turn, and switches to throw, and it would be accurate to say that not a single one of those buttons, levers, handles, or switches got away without being used by either me or my wife. Lots and lots of fun.

Ah, the classic Polar Cub Electric Vibrator. For the lady of the house to use on her

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throat. Her throat.

A very short distance from the Electrity Hall was the BT Connected Earth building. As you’ve probably guessed, this was a part of the museum focussed on telephone communication and, like the building we’d just come from, this also featured a lot of things to play with for children aged 0-99: morse code, telegraph messaging, dialing and watching the electronic relays moving to connect calls, using rotary phones and calling other phones elsewhere in the building, that sort of thing. Noisy as well as entertaining and educational again – I even learnt some things and I’m a regular Mr Know-It-All usually – and it was great to see and be reminded of the explosion of new phone designs that came out from the 1960s onwards.

The grounds of Amberley Museum are surrounded on three sides by the chalk hills of the South Downs and we had a few moments to enjoy some of the attractive scenery on the crisp day of our visit as we crossed the railway tracks to the thing we next wanted to take a look at.

That thing we wanted to take a look at was one of the filming locations used in the James Bond film A View To A Kill. If you’ve seen the movie then you’ll know that the evil plot involved explosives in a mine at one point and the mine entrance in question for Operation Main Strike was here at Amberley. Having rewatched the scene where Grace Jones emerges with the explosives to the annoyance of Christopher Walken recently it’s amazing to see how incredibly recognisable the area still is so many years after the movie. Some information about the film along with a prop from it – a skip in which Roger Moore and Tanya Roberts rode (after it was apparantly smoothed down to make sure neither star caught their skin or clothing on its interior) – was in the nearby railway exhibit building.

Following a small diversion to watch the wheelwright keeping some children occupied with trying to fix spokes into the wooden hub of a wheel outside his shop we made our way down to the De Witt Kilns not through any strong love of the art of pottery but because the building itself looked fantastic. Set lower than the surrounding paths around the museum, waterlogged ground and train track running alongside, a couple of arguably eerie sculptures of kiln-workers in the vicinity because of the chill in the air and silence all around, the massive brick building with its arched kilns was the single most impressive structure on the museum’s site.

We were making our way back towards the museum entrance/exit at this point and the next set of buildings we came across were those of the garage and cycle shop and the Southdown bus garage. A family friend and my wife’s father both used to drive buses (and knew each other through that job years before my wife and I ever met) so we’re never disappointed to have a nose around the vintage transportation when we see it. The bus garage contained some nice examples of old vehicles but I especially liked the booking office next to it offering exciting bus trips such as a drive to North Wales or even a Mystery Tour!

The final things we saw during this visit to Amberley Museum were the Fire Station with a few examples of fire-fighting vehicles inside before slightly doubling back on ourselves to wander through Greenwood Village, a far more rural setting for woodcraft people to demonstrate stick making and wood turning. This was a pleasant area and probably a lot more enjoyable in the warmer months with more people around.

On the way to the exit we passed a shop and a café, the former not being open but likely to be so later in the year, while the latter appeared to be serving the small number of other visitors to the site.

We exited through the gift shop, naturally, and we bought things, naturally, because that’s what we do when we visit places we like.

We liked Amberley Museum a lot. For a spur-of-the-moment decision it turned out to be a great one with loads to see not just on this visit but with plenty to come back and see more of plus lots we didn’t get around to. There are nature trails which we’d like to walk once there has been a more sustained period of dry weather and there were lots of buildings that weren’t open because the volunteers or craftspeople hadn’t turned up on the day of our visit. You can get a rough idea who will be available on the museum’s website but nothing is guaranteed. And we’d love to see that Tesla Coil in action.

Amberley had a good mix of activities, education, and nostalgia suitable for a huge range of age; kids will love the train and bus and playing around with the phones and electrical elements; adults will love some of the vintage TV and radio equipment and they’ll also love the train and bus and playing around with the phones and electrical elements. An easy-to-find place in the country, lots to see and do, and some great-sounding events planned throughout the upcoming year that almost guarantees we’ll be back at least once in 2020. Why, yes, I am talking about the ale festival.