Brede Værk, Denmark’s biggest protected industrial plant, is administered by the Nationalmuseet which has undertaken the task to give the Danish capital a brand new cultural venue showing the huge industrial development that has radically changed the everyday lives of the Danes over the past few centuries. The brand new Brede Værk museum opens its doors on May 21 to give visitors an obvious possibility: see old machinery, hear how Denmark became an industrial country (from the first watermills to LEGO), allow yourself to be shown around by your own virtual guide and join in the work on the assembly line! And it’s all free.
In the area there have been watermills since the Middle Ages. Over time they have helped to process copper, grain, gunpowder etc. From 1832 until it was closed down in 1956, the old Brede Værk industrial plant was producing copperware and later textiles, amon
g other things. The Nationalmuseet (which was housing its Conservation Department in the plant) moved to preserve it as a reminder of Denmark's past. Still intact are the cottages of the working-class families, even the houses of the foremen. Their former eating house has been turned into a restaurant today, and there are even an orphanage and a nursery garden.
The old factory buildings house exhibitions illustrating "The Cradle of Industry." Our delight here is touring Brede House, a neoclassical manor dating from 1795. The owner of the mill, Peter van Hemert, lived here with his family before he went bankrupt in 1805. He pictured himself a fanciful decorator, decking his halls like he was Louis XVI.
Adjacent to Brede Værk stands the reconstructed village in Lyngby, one of the largest and oldest (1897) open-air museums in the world, where you can wander into a time capsule of long ago and return to a town that still lives on in the 19th century, when Hans Christian Andersen was writing all those fairy tales. The open-air museum recaptures Denmark's one-time rural character. The "museum" is nearly 36 hectares (89 acres), a 3km (1 3/4-mile) walk around the compound, and includes more than 50 re-created buildings -farmsteads, windmills, and fishermen's cottages.
Exhibits include a half-timbered 18th-century farmstead from one of the tiny windswept Danish islands, a primitive longhouse from the remote Faroe Islands, thatched fishermen's huts from Jutland, tower windmills, and a potter's workshop from the mid-19th century. Folk dancers in native costume perform, and there are demonstrations of lacemaking and loom weaving.
But let us take a closer look at the new major attraction just north of Copenhagen, the Brede Værk factory. Each visitor will be given an “Active Ticket” that can be used to activate the exhibits, get customized information and register the results of games and activities. For example in a dramatized section you can choose a virtual guide who will appear in various places and talk about his or her working life at the factory. You can follow the sweeping-boy, the weaver, the engineer or the secretary (who incidentally has a soft spot for the engineer...).
The museum is divided up into three very different new experience sections:
The first is an exhibition which uses objects, sounds, light and film among other things to describe the everyday history of ordinary Danes on their way towards modern society, the importance of the industrial products for everyday life (how many people today can imagine a life without electric light?) and see the inventors’ ideas (both the hits and the misses). And finally the exhibition dares to take a stab at what the future will be like.
- In the second part you quite literally go with Mother to the factory! For this is where you visit one of the biggest women’s workplaces of the nineteenth century, the cloth mill with huge machines and the related dye-works and management office.
- In the third part of the museum, “the Engine Room”, the whole family can work together to shovel “coal” to create energy, produce goods on the assembly line and finally try to manage the sales of clothing as well as possible. If the collaboration works in the small textile plant the reward is that the little steam engine starts up! If you have established a profile with the Active Ticket it is possible to go into more detail with themes and people when you get home.
At Brede Værk there are enough experiences for a whole day at the factory in a unique cultural landscape. If you really want to make a gastronomical feast of it you may be tempted by the Brede ‘Eating House’ with its romantic view of the lake and its French cuisine.
In connection with the exhibition there will be a special micro-website where you can prepare yourself for the experience of the museum or digest impressions and images when you get home.