Weald & Downland Open Air Museum, Singleton 1987

A view at the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum in Singleton, West Sussex, in 1987, showing visitors walking between reconstructed historic buildings in the museum grounds. The scene includes a thatched flint building on the right, timber-framed and tile-hung structures on the left, and a traditional wagon further back along the pale gravel path. Opened to the public in 1970, the museum was created to rescue and rebuild threatened historic buildings from across the Weald and Downland region, and by the late 1980s it was already established as one of the country’s leading open-air museums of rural architecture. This photograph captures the site in the years when the Bayleaf Farm project was being developed, adding to the sense of a living heritage landscape rather than a static display.