“Real museums are places where time is transformed into space,” Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel laureate, writes in his 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence. Pamuk created a small museum of everyday objects based on the novel in celebration of his home city of Istanbul. A long way from the Bosphorous, this is what Beamish, the Living Museum of the North sets out to do, recreating the 19th- and 20th-century working-class history of north-east England over 350 acres in County Durham. Last week it won the prestigious Art Fund museum of the year award.

The shortlist included museums from the UK’s four nations: Perth Museum, which opened last year; Chapter, a multi-arts space in Cardiff; Golden Thread, a contemporary arts hub in Belfast; and Compton Verney, an 18th-century Warwickshire mansion, whose........

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