LONG lost possessions gathering dust in your attic could be brought to life as Beamish Museum moves into the rock ‘n’ roll era.

Staff at the open-air attraction in County Durham are on the look out for everyday objects for their planned 1950s town. They also hope to eventually create an 1980s world.

Their Great Donate event, which emulates a similar event held in the 1960s when Beamish was first being developed, will take place throughout half term week, from February 16 to 24.

Members of the public can take their objects to the Donation Station which opens at the Beamish Regional Resource Centre on Saturday for a week.

Larger items like sofas and furniture can even be picked up by staff from people’s homes.

Richard Evans, museum director at Beamish said: “We want every day things. That might be some furniture, something from the kitchen or bedroom or tools.

“Beamish is all about telling the story of everyday life in the North East so rather than telling people what we want, the whole idea is for local people to tell us what we want.”

Beamish Museum opened in 1972 and has built up exhibits from Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian life.

The museum’s founder Frank Atkinson started his collection with a well publicised public appeal in the 1960s for items from the industrial revolution to the turn of the 20th century.

Current director Richard hopes 2013’s appeal will re-ignite the public’s enthusiasm for the region’s history and see a range of objects land at their door.

So far donations have included a miner’s jacket and helmet from the National Coal Board, magazines, records and a elegant mannequin that would have displayed the region’s first bras.

Richard said: “The 1950s was a period of austerity but a huge time of development in terms of housing, shops and road developments.

“It was a time of great social and economic change, and significantly in the North East, it was a period of recovery after the Second World War.

“It’s remarkable if you stop and think about it as a decade. There’s the development of the NHS, industrial change and shifts in mining and ship building.”

At the end of November last year, the museum bought a block of four Airey-style houses from Kibblesworth in Gateshead.

They were painstakingly deconstructed, loaded on to pallets and transported to Beamish. They will be reassembled there when final plans for the 1950s town take shape.

Rather than telling people what we want, the idea is for local people to tell us what we want