I'm a home ground man and don't go abroad much so my idea of a holiday is to spend three weeks at Beamish, Ironbridge or the Black Country Museum in Dudley, West Midlands.

Thirty years ago it took a band of dedicated archaeologists to decide something should be done to preserve our past instead of allowing its wholesale slaughter. I'm fed up with seeing men with Rolls Royces smashing steam engines up.

They decided they better save a few artefacts from our grandfathers' day and not just from the Egyptian era. All the museums where I live in Bolton are full of stuffed birds, flint arrowheads and Roman remains. It's exactly the same as when I was 13. I find that a trifle boring. There is practically nothing from our recent past.

At the Black Country Museum you go down to the pit and see a wooden pit frame, a steam winder, a man with a bowler hat and neckerchief and a little bell on the table. He goes "ding, ding!" pulls a lever and the engine goes "whoof! whoof!" and up comes the cage with a tub of coal with grass growing on it. It's the mechanics of it that I'm interested in - how they solved problems with sinking shafts, ventilation and gas.

But it weren't quite like that! Were it buggery. It were unbelievably violent, the bells were ringing and the cage would arrive having done 57 miles an hour up the shaft. Time was money and the more tubs of coal you could wind up the better. All for the sake of money and greed. You couldn't see spokes on wheels going round. Now everything is slowed down to about an eighth of the pace it once was.

But they have tried hard to recreate a town from the past. It even smells of 1910. Magic!

Interview by Gavan Naden