Leagrave Cottages and Preston Bisset Privy

The cottages from 57 Compton Avenue at Leagrave, near Luton in Bedfordshire started life in the early eighteenth century as a weatherboarded thatched barn with central double doors at the front. In the late eighteenth century the barn was `converted` into two labourers' cottages. The cottage next to the road has been restored to this period. The other half is furnished as it might have been in the late 1920s, illustrating how the building had changed in the intervening years. A shoemaker's workshop occupies the out-shot and the nineteenth-century Preston Bisset Privy incorporating two bucket toilets is located in the Leagrave garden.

Harpenden Well Head

The well head gear dates from the late eighteenth century, and is from Upper Top Street Farm, Harpenden, Hertfordshire. The well house itself is a new structure based on the original, with an oak timber frame sitting on a brick plinth, and clad with tarred elm weatherboards. The well is lined with brick. In parts of the Chilterns where gravel overlies the chalk, wells were usually lined from the surface until the chalk was reached.

This two seated privy from Mercers Farm, Kingswood was donated to Chiltern Open Air Museum in 1985 as it was no longer in use. It is a small softwood framed building, clad in elm feather edged boarding which has been tarred, and it has a slate roof. Internally it has been plastered, and has a brick floor. There are two seats at different heights for adults and children. There is a hinged flap at the back to gain access to the buckets.

Donated by Chiltern District Council
Rebuilt 1992 - 1993

Amersham Prefab

An estimated 160,000 prefabricated temporary bungalows were made between 1945 and 1948, to help ease the acute housing shortage after the Second World War. With traditional materials scarce, and traditional building methods relatively slow, mass-produced factory-made houses using alternative resources provided one solution to the urgent need for houses. This model, which was one of 46 at Finch Lane, Amersham, was intended to provide only temporary housing. In fact it was occupied for forty years until the site was redeveloped for permanent housing in 1987. It is a 'Universal House, Mark 3' manufactured in nearby Rickmansworth. The furnishings inside the Prefab are not the original pieces but are contemporary with the period.

Henton Mission Room

This prefabricated building, originally erected in 1886 at Henton, near Chinnor, Oxfordshire, is an example of the popular prefabricated buildings that served as churches or mission rooms in the UK. Missionaries also took them all over the world as they were easy to put up and take down and transport. Manufactured by Boulton & Paul of Norwich, it is in timber-framed sections bolted together with an external cladding of corrugated iron. It contained fifty chairs arranged either side of a central aisle. There was a small altar table, two brass candlesticks, a lectern and a harmonium. The Room was lit by two oil lamps suspended from the ceiling.

Daub Project

Behind the Henton Mission Room an experimental project to test various types of daub is in progress. The sections of walling are reused from a barn at Mapledurham, near Reading, which collapsed in the early 1980s. The construction is typical of timber-framed buildings dating from the medieval period through to the late seventeenth century. The panels created by this system of framing were usually infilled with wattle and daub: upright staves were sprung into holes and grooves in the horizontal timbers. Split laths or wattles were then woven between them. Daub (a mixture of mud, straw and dung) was pressed into and smeared over the wattles to create a solid wall. Different types of mixes of daub and methods of application are being experimented with at the Museum.

Garston Forge

Built around 1860 at Garston, near Watford, this forge was worked by the members of the Martin family until 1926. Many of the bricks have the initials J C cast on them, possibly indicating their production at John Chapman`s brick works at Bucknalls Lane, Garston. The hearth comes from a forge at Naphill. The floor is of local cobbles, known as 'dennors', with an area of timber balks where horses were shod. Outside, the circular cast-iron platform was used for putting on the metal tyres of wooden cart wheels.

Leavesden Apple Store

The Apple Store was originally built in 1904 to house metal tanks used for disinfecting soiled clothes and bedding at Leavesden Hospital, near Watford, Hertfordshire. The design of the building - with its brick plinth, louvred walls and boarded roof - appears outmoded for the period. This is because it was based on a structure known as 'the old blanket house', built about thirty years before and located near the hospital laundry. At some time after 1910 its use changed to that of a temporary apple store - with the louvred walls providing some comfort to apple sorters during a hot harvest.