//
Photo: Maurice Miner, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Few of us nowadays will ever go underground in a working coal mine, so this museum (the former Caphouse Colliery) is an essential experience of this great but departed industry. The mine was active from the 1770s to 1985, then re-opened as a museum in 1988. The old guard may be shocked to learn that this "identifies as women-owned". Scrubbing muck off your man's back in a tin bath not good enough for you, lass?
National Coal Mining Museum for England is based at the site of Caphouse Colliery in Overton, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, England. It opened in 1988 as the Yorkshire Mining Museum and was granted national status in 1995.
© OpenStreetMap contributors
Extensive outdoor and smaller indoor collection, mostly by Moore and Hepworth, plus various temporary installations. Many visitors miss the Skyspace, a Tyrell installation in a former deer hide. The park is centred on Bretton Hall, a mansion of 1720 and later a college. No visits to this, the Groucho Club of London are converting it into their northern outpost.
Small local history museum on the ground floor of city council offices and library.
Opened in 2011, this is the city's top sight – though it’s debatable whether, given its concrete brutalist design, it counts as an “attraction”. Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth spent their early years in Wakefield district and their work and story makes up the bulk of the permanent collection. There are also rotating exhibitions of other artists.