Pendon Museum

Pendon Museum stands in Long Wittenham, Oxfordshire, among fields and hedgerows. It holds a large model scene of the Vale of White Horse as it looked in the 1920s and 1930s. The display began in the 1950s under Roye England, who wanted to preserve the disappearing architecture of the area. Guy Williams, a fellow modeller, built fifty-seven of the ninety locomotives on show. Their work appears in the 1958 British Pathé film Hair Thatching. The museum also includes smaller layouts such as Madder Valley and the Sea Wall Scene. The Vale scene is a 1:76 scale model of a fictional village called Pendon Parva. Every building and feature is a precise copy of a real place from the inter-war years. Trains like the GWR 2900 Class No. 2943 Hampton Court and the LSWR N15 Class No. 789 Sir Guy run along the tracks. On the ground floor, a Dartmoor branch line shows Brunel’s timber viaduct at Walkham. Madder Valley, built by John Ahern between 1941 and 1951, pioneered placing railways in their landscape context. Visitors find working models set in detailed countryside and villages. The trains follow timetables from the 1920s, running on EM gauge track. Displays explain how each locomotive and carriage was hand built from old records and photographs. Artefacts and modelling tools show the craft behind the scenes. The Sea Wall Scene offers a compact view of Brunel’s line at Teignmouth. Together, the layouts bring a vanished era to life in miniature.