Normanby Park: a Victorian house and walled garden

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Today we went to Normanby Hall and a Victorian Walled Garden. They both were built in the Victorian times.

This is the front of the house and it is very grand with large pillars. The tall, imposing door was just creaking open as I took this photograph. I thought it might have been a ghost of the past going to haunt someone!

At the entrance to the park are two black iron gates. Both of them are HUGE, but one is much larger than the other. The larger one was for the rich people who owned the Country house and their guests; the smaller gate was for servants. We entered the park through the smaller gate.

I really liked the Victorian walled garden. It was full of flowers, herbs and an assortment of fruit and vegetables. The apples were growing on the wall because the wall heats up, it heats up because of the sun.
The Walled Garden was there because you could get better quality fruit and vegetables for the rich people of the hall by growing it yourself.

Victorian childhood

Today I am learning about Victorian childhood. I have asked myself the following questions:

• What kinds of entertainment did Victorian children have?

This picture is of a zoetrope. A zoetrope was a toy for rich Victorian boys which was used to help boys ask scientific questions about how it worked. Rich boys would also have trains and toy soldiers. However, if you were poor you were more likely to play outside and just use whatever you could get your hands on, such as mud for mud pies, bridges and tunnels; hats or tin cans for tin-can-copper and kick-can-policeman. (I don't know what happens in those games though). 

If you were a girl, you would have dolls in preparation for motherhood. If you were rich you might have a very beautiful doll made out of wood and wax. For example, here is a picture of a Victorian doll which would have belonged to a rich girl. If you were a poor child, you would be more likely to have a cloth peg doll (my mummy says that the doll might not have been so beautiful, but the child probably loved it just as much. I think that the child might have loved a cloth peg doll more because they didn't have as many other toys and dolls.) Rich girls might have had dolls' houses for learning about domestic skills - cleaning and household management. Rich girls were encouraged to make dolls' clothes and soft furnishings to practice their sewing. 

In Victorian times, entertainment for middle class children wasn't ever so different from some of the things that we do nowadays. For example, on wet days middle class children might play snakes and ladders or happy families. They wouldn't have had computers or televisions though!

• Did Victorian children go on holidays?

Middle class and upper class children would go to the seaside. Lower middle class families had a week's holiday each year. The seaside, for many Victorians, holds quite a romantic image. Seaside accommodation could be excellent, in-between, or awful. For example, once a family hired a doctor's house for a week and ran out on the first day because of the rodents.

A normal seaside holiday included walks along the sea shore, donkey-riding, bathing, band concerts, and punch and judy shows. There was also a pier where one could play games or go on fairground rides. 

The seaside WASN'T a Victorian invention - people went to the seaside for holidays before Victorian times.