This site has many examples of 19th century buildings, that would have been used by framework knitters, This includes the range of different housing quality, the more important you were the grander your house. These styles ranged from pinch penny cottages, if you were a framework knitter too large houses with grander features & de cur, such as the headmasters house for the boys school. It also shows the type of public facilities, that were available too the framework knitters, these include housing to support the large workforce, a boy & girls school to give the framework knitters children an education & a variety of churches to satisfy their spiritual needs. I found the museum useful during my visit because, it gave me plenty of secondary & primary information for my research project into the framework knitting industry in Ruddington.
However the buildings do not give a clear picture, about how life was in Ruddington during the 19th century, this is due too the poor build quality of particular types of houses such as pinch penny cottages, meaning their interior, exterior & original features on many have been removed or highly modified. Also on most of the public buildings & houses there has been lots of modernisation meaning that new doors have been fitted, electricity added & many have been converted away from their original use such as the boys school which is now a printing office.
All this modification, means that when the museum was opened they decided to be very careful & recreate as realistic as possible what Ruddington would look like in the 19th century. Even thought large amounts of the buildings have been modernised the historians look at descriptions of Ruddington they've found & also look at pictures & paintings. As well as looking at other similar settlements, that were around at the same time. So they can try to be a historically accurate as possible. They were helped by the local people as well, who donated many 19th century objects so they could decorate the interior, with the same authenticity.
There are things that the museum couldn't recreate, such as the sound & smell of what working in a framework knitting factory be like. These would be very hard to recreate as there are no recordings, of the sounds & they wouldn't be allowed to reconstruct it due to health & safety, as the volume would be dangerous, to the people using the machines. The only thing they could was to get a recording of one framework knitter working & use a surround sound system to give the impression of what it would have been like, but this would cost a lot of money to do. The smell is even harder to recreate, as the only way they would be able to do it, would be if they set up a working framework knitting workshop, in the conditions of the 19th century & that would cost a lot of money & would be unappeasable.
There is also other information historians could look at too help understand what life was like in 19th century Ruddington. We could look at the census of the people of Ruddington, so we can see how many people would, live in the average house & what the mean age of the people of Ruddington were, whether the majority were young or old. They could also look at books written at the time, to see what type of literature was popular in the 19th century. They can also check bank records to see whether the majority of the people in Ruddington were in impoverished or wealthy.
Overall I think that the visit to Ruddington gives a good idea of the way framework knitters lived & their quality of life. It can't recreate it all due to parts being very hard to recreate, but the parts it could it did were very authentic & realistic to the time frame. It informs very well on the part of history it focuses on & handles it well.
