Bracken Hall Countryside Centre and Museum

Bracken Hall Countryside Centre and Museum was a children's museum, natural history education centre and nature centre established in 1989 at Bracken Hall on the edge of Baildon Moor, close to Shipley Glen in West Yorkshire.In 2013 the Bradford Council removed their funding of the museum, which is now closed. The Friends of Bracken Hall is working to gather support in order to reopen the museum, and the centre is planned to re-open in late 2015.Site layoutMuseum building and front gardenBuildingThis c. 1890s Yorkshire gritstone building was once a bailiff's house, then a farm house, and it still has the original big, old, pannelled front door. It is of the traditional rural, symmetrical, four-up, four-down domestic design which was common in the Georgian era and continued throughout the 19th century. This type of house has two rooms each side of the front door, stairs in the middle leading back from the front door, and two upstairs bedrooms each side of the stairwell, with a 19th-century dressing room above the front hall. The walls between front and back rooms are load-bearing, and supported by the two chimneys, which allow fireplaces in all eight main rooms. Bradford City Council has built an extra ground-floor room onto the left hand side, and this contains the museum entrance door and reception. The two original downstairs front rooms are now the Archaeology room and Exhibition room. The public cannot see the two downstairs back rooms, the stairs or the upstairs rooms, which are now accessed from behind the reception desk; therefore the public has access to just a quarter of the original building. The back door leads from the new entrance room to the back garden and the toilets.