Qualla: Amberley Museum & Heritage Centre

Amberley Museum & Heritage Centre: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Trimming, CC BY-SA 2.0. The quarry tunnel at Amberley Museum doubled as the entrance to Mainstrike Mine in the James Bond film A View to a Kill. That is the kind of detail that captures attention, but the museum itself is something quieter and more remarkable: a 36-acre former chalk quarry near Arundel where over a century of industrial heritage has been gathered, rebuilt, and set running again by volunteers who believe that the way things were made matters as much as the things themselves.

Image: Peter Trimming | CC BY-SA 2.0

Amberley Museum & Heritage Centre: Chalk and Lime

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. For more than a hundred years, chalk was extracted from this quarry in the South Downs and processed into lime for use in mortar and cement. The original lime kilns still stand, including a De Witt set -- a type of continuous-burning kiln designed for maximum efficiency. When the...

Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Amberley Museum & Heritage Centre: Everything That Made Things Work

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AmberleyMuseum2025, CC BY-SA 4.0. The exhibits at Amberley are not about grandeur but about how ordinary life was sustained. A reconstructed 1930s village garage shows how cars were repaired when parts were machined by hand. The Paviors Hall of Road Making traces road construction from Roman techniques to modern ...

Image: AmberleyMuseum2025 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Amberley Museum & Heritage Centre: Narrow Gauge and Southdown

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Trimming from Croydon, England, CC BY 2.0. Two collections anchor the museum's transport heritage. The Amberley Museum Railway is a narrow-gauge railway and exhibition hall with forty-five locomotives -- five steam, twenty-nine internal combustion, four battery electric -- and around eighty items of rolling stock, largely...

Image: Peter Trimming from Croydon, England | CC BY 2.0

Amberley Museum & Heritage Centre: Living Skills

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Basher Eyre, CC BY-SA 2.0. Amberley is not a museum where everything sits behind glass. Craftspeople demonstrate woodturning, broom-making, walking-stick carving, and blacksmithing on site. The machine shop's tools are still used for maintenance of other exhibits -- a museum that repairs itself. A reproduc...

Image: Basher Eyre | CC BY-SA 2.0