Hagen Open-air Museum — Attraction in Hagen

The Hagen Westphalian Open-Air Museum (German: LWL-Freilichtmuseum Hagen – Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Handwerk und Technik; English: "LWL Open-air Museum Hagen – Westphalian State Museum for Craft and Technics") is a museum at Hagen in the southeastern Ruhr area, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. The museum was founded, together with the Detmold Open-air Museum, in 1960, and was first opened to the public in the early 1970s. The museum is run by the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe (LWL, regional authority for Westphalia and Lippe within North Rhine-Westphalia). It lies in the Hagen neighbourhood of Selbecke south of Eilpe in the Mäckingerbach valley. The open-air museum brings a bit of skilled-trade history into the present, and it takes a hands-on approach. On its grounds stretching for about 42 ha, not only are urban and rural trades simply "displayed" along with their workshops and tools, but in more than twenty of the nearly sixty rebuilt workshops, they are still practised, and interested visitors can, sometimes by themselves, take part in the production. Crafts and trades demonstrated at the Westphalian Open-Air Museum include ropemaking, smithing, brewing, baking, tanning, printing, milling, papermaking, etc. An important attraction is the triphammer workshop. Once the hammer is engaged, a craftsman goes to work noisily forging a scythe, passing it between the hammer and the anvil underneath in a process...

A truly nice place with a lot of industrial history and culture, a living history open air museum. Affordable admission fees and plenty to see for the price. The whole organisation however is very bad. The sign about a damaged way to the museum isn't on display for all to see. First you have to make the whole way to the entrance just to be informed that the road is damaged and you have to walk a different route to get in. Another issue we had is the museum staff trying to teach parents how to talk to their own child. When a parent is talking to a child particularly if it is an anxious autistic child, it is really not the place of a museum employee to tell a parent what to say or not to say to their child. Also staff is not able to explain stuff in a child friendly way unfortunately. Communication and demonstrations are very (really VERY) formal. Children get bored quickly. Adults too to be honest. There's no personal interchange between visitors and staff. It's like employees are reading from a book to you while showing the crafts. Very strange.

Also the food shop (colonial shop it's called) sells many goods which are already expired (which we only noticed at home unfortunately). The bakery/cafe though is excellent, very tasty freshly made cakes.

Some signs at the museum are in English which is helpful to...

Amazing place to learn about life in late middle age. In front of it you find the parking lot - to me it was nice to take the route straight away from highway, otherwise you spend too much time through the city. Check in could be kinda little bit more smoothly but was okay. You start experiencing could and hot metal processing, up to the making of hand made nails for woods. Here and there you are invited to take part on live production. There you can ask lots of questions. It was awesome. Further on track you will find lots of different hand made productions and also a home made backery. But hurry in case you'd like to buy some 🍞, it was sold out quite after lunch time but really tasty (remember it's my experience 😉). The whole museum track would take you 3 to 5 hours probably. Depending on your excitement. For families: it's friendly for kids, included with a playground with water actions. It was a nice time we had, although I experienced how much trees they...