Andrew Carnegie Birthplace Museum

The Andrew Carnegie Birthplace Museum stands in Dunfermline, Fife, on three linked buildings: the 18th-century weavers’ cottage where Andrew Carnegie was born in 1835, the adjoining cottage at 4 Moodie Street, and a 1920s memorial hall designed by James Shearer. The site is cared for by the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust and includes boundary walls decorated with scrolls and thistle motifs. The cottages were built in the 1770s, and the memorial hall was added between 1925 and 1928 in 17th-century Scottish baronial style. The museum is worth the journey because it won the 2019 Family Friendly Museum Award, beating more than 800 other nominations. Andrew Carnegie left the cottage in 1848 at the age of 13 when his hand-loom weaving family moved to Pennsylvania. His wife later bought the cottage in 1895 and gave it to the trust when it was founded in 1903. The first displays opened in 1908, and the collection grew with gifts from the Carnegie family. Inside, visitors find the original cottage kept much as it was in the 1830s, with family portraits and archival papers. The memorial hall holds architectural drawings of the Carnegie Institute and natural history specimens. A small display also shows puppets from Sesame Street, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The buildings are linked by a single-storey passage, and the hall’s crowstepped gables and clerestory windows can be seen from Priory Lane.