About
The Broadcast Engineering Museum holds one of the largest collections of historic broadcasting equipment anywhere in the world, and it does so in the former sergeants' mess of RAF Hemswell, a 1930s expansion-period bomber station on the Lincolnshire cliff north of Lincoln. The Broadcast Engineering Conservation Group, a charitable body of former and serving broadcast engineers, bought the building in 2021, which gave a collection that had spent years in scattered storage a permanent home with the floor area and the workshops it needed.
The subject is the machinery behind the picture. Television and radio have always depended on enormous quantities of specialised, expensive, rapidly obsolete engineering, and almost none of it was kept: when a format died, the equipment went for scrap because it was worth nothing and occupied valuable space. The collection covers outside broadcast vehicles, studio and portable cameras, videotape machines, telecine, audio and sound desks, transmitters, lighting, public address and the test equipment that kept it all within specification.
Crucially, a great deal of it works. The museum's 1968 Southern Television outside broadcast truck is demonstrated live with its cameras feeding Studio 1; an RCA quadruplex two-inch videotape machine is run; and a teleprinter clatters out the football results as it would have done on a Saturday afternoon. Watching a valve camera being lined up by someone who used to do it professionally is a very different proposition from reading a caption beside a dead one.
The collection matters beyond nostalgia. Because early television was largely transmitted live and videotape did not arrive until the later 1950s, an enormous proportion of British broadcasting simply does not survive as recordings. The equipment is therefore a substantial part of what remains of the medium's first decades.
The museum opens on a limited number of published open days through the year, plus the September Heritage Open Days weekend. It does not keep weekly hours, so plan around the dates. The result is a museum that appeals well beyond the obvious constituency of former engineers. Anyone who has watched British television has watched the output of machines like these, and seeing them running — hot, loud, mechanical and enormously physical — makes the medium first fifty years suddenly tangible.
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Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
💡 Visitor Tips
- This is an open-days-only museum. Check the group's own website or social media for current dates before travelling — there are only a handful each year.
- Open days run roughly 11:00 to 16:00 and admission is £8 for adults and £4 for children aged five to fifteen, with under-fives free.
- The Heritage Open Days weekend in September is free, which makes it the cheapest way to see the collection.
- Allow much longer than you expect. Two and a half hours is realistic and enthusiasts routinely stay all day.
- The August open day coincides with a British Vintage Wireless Society swapmeet and is the busiest and most interesting day for radio enthusiasts.
- Ask the volunteers questions. They are largely retired broadcast engineers and the depth of explanation available is extraordinary.
- The site is remote — roughly 20 km from Lincoln and 14 km from Gainsborough, with thin bus services — so driving is effectively necessary.
- The Hemswell antiques centres are a kilometre away in other buildings of the same former RAF station, if you want to make a longer trip of it.
Highlights
The 1968 Southern Television OB Truck
The museum's outside broadcast truck, built for Southern Television in 1968, is demonstrated working with its cameras feeding Studio 1, which is a genuinely rare thing to see.
An OB truck was a complete television control room packed into a vehicle, taken to a racecourse or a cathedral or a football ground and made to produce a broadcast-quality output on location, with vision mixing, sound, communications and vision control all crammed into a space the size of a small van.
Sitting in it while it works explains outside broadcasting better than any documentary.
Southern Television itself lost its franchise in 1981, which makes the vehicle a survivor twice over.
The Camera Collection
The museum holds a large collection of television cameras spanning the medium's history, from early monochrome image orthicon studio cameras — vast, heavy, mounted on wheeled pedestals and requiring a skilled operator plus a vision engineer riding the picture continuously — through the colour era to later portable equipment.
Placed in sequence they document a technology that shrank by a factor of a hundred in fifty years. Several are demonstrated working on open days, which allows visitors to see how a valve camera actually had to be set up and held in adjustment.
A studio camera of the 1950s could weigh as much as a small motorcycle and needed a pedestal, an operator and a vision engineer to produce a usable picture.
The Quadruplex Videotape Machine
The RCA quadruplex two-inch videotape recorder is one of the museum's set-piece demonstrations and one of the most important machines in broadcasting history. Before quadruplex arrived in the later 1950s, television was overwhelmingly live: what went out could not be preserved except by filming a monitor.
Videotape changed the entire economics and practice of the medium.
These machines were enormous, ferociously complex and maintained by teams of engineers, and seeing one threaded, run and producing a picture is a genuine privilege. The tape ran two inches wide and the machines were priced like houses.
Telecine
Telecine machines converted film into a television signal, and for decades they carried an enormous share of what audiences watched: feature films, filmed drama, news footage and commercials all reached the screen through them. The engineering problem is harder than it sounds, since film runs at twenty-four frames a second and television did not, and the solutions devised were ingenious and various.
The museum's telecine equipment covers the flying spot and other approaches, and demonstrates a technology that has vanished completely from modern practice.
The judder produced by the frame-rate mismatch is still visible in old broadcasts.
Collections
The Broadcast Engineering Conservation Group holds one of the largest collections of historic broadcasting equipment in the world, covering television and radio from the earlier decades of both media to the recent past. Holdings include outside broadcast vehicles, studio and portable television cameras, videotape recorders including quadruplex machines, telecine equipment, vision mixers and control room apparatus, audio desks, microphones and sound recording equipment, transmitters, television lighting, public address systems and the specialised test equipment required to keep broadcast plant within specification.
A substantial proportion of the collection has been restored to working order and is demonstrated live on open days, with a studio in operation and outside broadcast vehicles run with their own cameras.
The group also provides temporary archive accommodation for the collection of the Museum of RAF Firefighting, which is viewable by appointment or on open days.
Studio 1 and the Camera Collection
A working television studio with historic cameras, vision control and mixing equipment, demonstrated live on open days alongside the museum's outside broadcast vehicles.
Videotape, Telecine and Transmission
Videotape machines including quadruplex recorders, telecine equipment, audio and transmission apparatus, documenting how programmes were recorded, played out and broadcast.
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.