Last weekend, I took our nine-year-old to the Abbey House Museum in Kirkstall, near Leeds. We’ve been a couple of times before, and it’s a nice little museum to visit for half a day. It’s also recently been reprieved from closure, but in the long term it needs more people visiting it to be viable.
The Abbey House Museum is essentially in three parts. The first is a recreated Leeds street scene, with various shops and houses that have been saved and transplanted into the museum. There’s a pub, a pharmacist, a general store, and many others. It’s a bit like Kirkgate in the York Castle Museum, but on a smaller scale. It’s designed to show how ordinary, working class Loiners would have lived in the past.
Exhibitions
Next, you go upstairs to an exhibition space. Previous exhibitions that we’ve seen have included one about various common household objects from the past now considered dangerous, back in 2019. Older Lego bricks contained various heavy metals like cadmium, there were sore throat pastilles containing potassium chlorate which can spontaneously combust, and there were plenty of things with asbestos in them. The last time we went, which was in 2021, the exhibition was about the Leeds music scene and various bands and venues.
This year’s exhibition is called ‘Story Time‘, and is all about children’s stories. Expect to see lots of books and toys, both old and new.
In the next room are various entertainment machines, which can tell your fortune or show an animated diorama. They require one or two old pennies, which can be obtained from an exchange machine that takes modern day British currency. Each 1d coin costs 10p and so have a pound coin spare if you want to try every machine.
The final space is the childhood collection. There’s a collection of dollhouses and toys, spread across several rooms.
History of the Abbey House Museum
The Abbey House Museum gets its name from Kirkstall Abbey, across the road, and it used to be the gatehouse. Parts of the building date back to the year 1152, and after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries (yes, him again!) it was repurposed as a farmhouse. It became a museum in 1927, and so hopefully it’ll be able to celebrate its 100th anniversary now that it has been saved from closure.
Expect to be able to spend half a day at the museum – we combined our visit with a trip to Tropical World, but you could pop across the road to the abbey itself as well, if you want to make a day of it.
Accessibility
Access at the Abbey House Museum is pretty good. The street scene does have some uneven floors and narrow doorways, but there is a lift. A Changing Places toilet is also available, and there is a Max Card discount as well. There used to be a café in the museum but this is now only open as a picnic room for school visitors – instead, the Abbey has a café and there’s a pub nearby.
Free parking is available (at the time of writing, though note that Leeds City Council has recently introduced modest parking charges at many of its sites), and it’s on major bus routes from Leeds city centre. If you’re arriving by train, it’s roughly equidistant from both Headingley and Kirkstall Forge stations – both of which are about a mile’s walk.