The Welsh museum crowned one of the best in the UK

It consistently rates as one of the most popular visitor attractions in Wales – and now a survey has confirmed that Blaenavon’s Big Pit National Coal Museum is one of the best museums in the whole of the UK.

The museum has been revealed as the third highest-rated in the UK, with 89.9% of reviews on Tripadvisor rating it with five stars.

The attraction has a stellar average star rating of 4.86 out of five, and visitors can learn about the country’s coal mining history during their trip to the UNESCO World Heritage site.

The study scraped review data for 5,557 UK museums listed on Tripadvisor. Each museum was assessed based on the proportion of 5-star reviews compared to total reviews and ranked accordingly. For the final ranking, only museums with over 1,000 reviews were included and any museum that was permanently closed was excluded.

The Coventry Music Museum has been revealed as the highest-rated in the country, with 93.3% of all reviews being five stars. The museum currently has a 4.92-star rating (out of five). It is currently the number one rated thing to do in Coventry on Tripadvisor and visitors can explore local music history. In total, 1,461 reviews have been left on Tripadvisor, with 1,363 of these being five stars.

Crowned second highest-rated is the Davidstow Airfield & Cornwall at War Museum in Camelford, North Cornwall. 91.7% of the 1,378 reviews on Tripadvisor are five stars, and the museum has a 4.91 average star rating presently. The museum reopens on March 31, and visitors can explore WWII history here.

In third place the Big Pit National Coal Museum is a UNESCO World Heritage Site where visitors can learn about the history of Welsh coal mining.

The former working mine is a perfect museum to visit with kids, offering an educational and interactive experience that can be both enjoyable and informative for children. In another recent poll the attraction was rated the best free museum to visit in the UK.

Ever imagined what life was like for the men, women and children who worked deep underground? Big Pit was once a working mine, and today the museum has former miners on hand to share their stories and history.

A working coal mine from 1880 to 1980, it was opened to the public in 1983 as a charitable trust called the Big Pit (Blaenavon) Trust. By 1 February 2001 Big Pit Coal Museum was incorporated into the National Museums and Galleries of Wales as the National Mining Museum of Wales.

Visitors can experience what it was like working on the coal face and travel 90m in a ‘cage’ to the pit bottom with a guide. There’s more to see above ground in a multi-media tour of a modern coal mine with a virtual miner, historic colliery buildings and exhibitions to explore in the Pithead Baths.

You can also take part in workshops, where the Big Pit’s Learning Team will guide you through 300 million years of Welsh history.

Find out more HERE