Beamish Museum's £17m expansion aims to bring in another 100,000 visitors

County Durham's re-creation of a north country pit town needs more 'engagers'. What, asks David Barnett, is the job spec?

A visitor enjoys a drink at Beamish’s coaching inn in County Durham

When Alice Black leaves work at the end of the day, she's always surprised by the fact that she's re-entering the 21st century.

Alice, like dozens of other staff at the Beamish Museum in County Durham, spends her shift immersed in the world of a century earlier, as one of the cogs that make this "living museum" an award-winning success, and which has just secured approval to press on with a £17m expansion plan.

There's no sneakily checking Facebook or updating Instagram for Alice, who's in her third year as a "town and pit-life engager" (actor to you and me) at the museum, a role she took straight from studying history and education and sitting her PGCE teaching qualification at Sunderland University. The small army of actors, some paid and some volunteers, live as their forebears might have done for the duration of the working day.

"I'm always surprised at the level of traffic on the roads when I pull out of the site," says Alice. "You get completely absorbed in it."

Beamish is a complete re-creation of a north country pit town, where visitors engage with the actors who regale them with tales of life in the early 1900s – the "core year" is 1913 – and often amaze and appal members of the iPad generation who visit on school trips with tales of archaic toilet arrangements.

The five-year overhaul will aim to bring in another 100,000 visitors a year – not exactly small beer at a time when museums, especially in the North, are being battered by Government funding cuts. At the heart of the plans is a fresh attraction which will focus on the 1950s, with a cinema (relocated brick-by-brick from Sunderland), houses and a cafe.

That will bring the museum even more into living memory for many of the visitors, says Geoff Longstaff, another full-time actor at Beamish.

Geoff is 53 and once had a career in local government. He worked in the human resources department of Durham County Council (the authority which has just given Beamish the go-ahead for its expansion plans) until he took redundancy in 2011 and was casting around for a new job.

"I used to come to Beamish as a child on school trips," says Geoff. "Back in the 1970s there were a lot of older people who could remember the years of the early 1900s that Beamish reproduced. Now the new 1950s exhibition will appeal to a lot of people who remember those years as well."

Alice and Geoff split their time between Beamish's middle-class town setting and the pit village, which is more working class. Today, Alice is working in the sweet shop while Geoff is astounding a generation used to whipping up a spreadsheet and running out a report in minutes with the laborious work of the print shop.

"No day is the same," says Alice. "You turn up for work and can be given any one of a number of different roles. People love doing research for the parts they play."

When Beamish first opened in the 1970s, it employed miners who had seen the decline of the North-east's mining industry. (In 1913, Durham had more than 300 pits employing 165,000 men and boys. Easington, the county's last colliery, only stopped its winding gear in 1993.) Now, according to Richard Evans, Beamish's director, the expansion will create 95 new jobs and 50 apprenticeships, bringing the total staff to 500.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the new plan is the proposal to create replicas of four "aged miners' homes" from South Shields, which will become a centre for people living with dementia – not least because the exact recreation of homes from the 1950s may well allow those with dementia to relax in settings that might be familiar to them.

According to Geoff Longstaff, one of the most common phrases he hears around the Beamish site is a wistful "I remember when my mam used to have one of those." As Beamish looks ahead to the next decade and aims for 750,000 visitors a year by 2020, the business of nostalgia seems to be more secure than the lifestyles and industries it commemorates.