Blists Hill Victorian Town, Ironbridge Gorge Museum, Shropshire

Picture yourself in a dark, claustrophobic space. It's hot, but you can't quite decide if this is real or an illusion brought about by the images of molten metal and the footage of tired-looking workmen, their faces glistening with sweat.

Suddenly the floor vibrates to the rhythmic thud of a gigantic machine. Then, as the images fade to black and white, a shiver goes down your spine as a male choir sings: "Danger waits our ev'ry motion/ Death seems ready to devour;/ Yet we seek our daily station/ Where the sun-beams never come,/ Follow hard our occupation,/ Glad when safety leads us home."

These powerful words come from The Miners' Tragedy, a ballad about a fatal accident that occurred at a pit in Madeley, Shropshire, on 3 January 1810. The pit is long gone, but it lives on thanks to Blists Hill's emotionally charged new visitor centre.

The visitor centre is one of many new elements introduced as part of a £12m redevelopment of Blists Hill. The first phase was Canal Street, a Victorian street and artisans' quarter featuring a range of businesses.

The final element was the August opening of an Incline Lift and Mine Railway. The latter takes visitors to the Clay Mine Experience, something that will draw attention to the fact that mining did not just involve coal, but also iron ore and clay.

More than nostalgia

Blists Hill is one of 10 museums spread across the Ironbridge Gorge. In an obvious attempt to strengthen the links with the other parts of the site, the last thing a visitor to Blists Hill now sees is a video telling a brief history of the Ironbridge World Heritage Site. This is intended as a "gateway", encouraging people to explore some more, and thus make the most of their annual passport ticket.

The investment in Blists Hill is apparent as soon as you enter the freshly expanded car park and look across to the new entrance. It is a postmodern affair: above it looms a fanciful chimney while flywheels, boilers and other industrial artefacts are mounted onto the facade.

Visitors pass under them to queue for tickets before entering into the heat and noise of the nine-minute multimedia show. This conveys a few facts, but its real task is more visceral as it seeks to capture the harsh reality of industrial life in Blists Hill and beyond.

The visitor is thus given a jolt before the nostalgia takes over. This is a very important task because, as heritage management consultant Marion Blockley has noted, all too often living museums such as Blists Hill tend to present the "attractive quaint aspects of craft production… at the expense of the reality of the 12-hour working day".

Back in time

The multimedia show begins on the ground floor of the new visitor centre and continues on the level above where a looped sequence shows people walking past a wall, their ghostly bodies fading as they go.

This effectively evokes the countless unnamed people that once worked here while simultaneously introducing the people we are about to meet, namely the costumed interpreters. Some of the latter, dressed in their fine Victorian attire, are shown in a series of large, framed photographs on the wall leading out to the recreated town.

Visitors can have their own Victorian-style portrait taken at the newly enlarged photographer's shop, which is one of an expanded row of stores on Canal Street. As I approached it, I thought for a moment that a new audioguide had been provided on account of the white cones that everyone seemed to be holding. But I quickly realised that these contained chips, not commentaries.

Indeed, the new Fried Fish Dealers appears to be doing a roaring trade. Presumably the food was a bit better in quality than in ye olden times: the site's blog - www.blistshill.org - reveals that frying was a tactic originally deployed to mask the fact that the fish on offer was either too rotten or ugly to be sold in a conventional fishmonger's window. The stench that came from a 19th-century chippy was such that it was branded a noxious trade.

Problems of reality

A seemingly innocent portion of fish and chips therefore gets right to the heart of a dilemma raised by Blists Hill: how to make the past palatable yet "authentic". The unrealistically hygienic chip shop made me recall what happened some years ago when the Natural History Museum unveiled its wildly popular animatronic Tyrannosaurus rex.

It was reported that the curators had opted to give it a tame swampy smell, but it was pointed out that the more realistic aroma of rotten meat wedged between the dinosaur's teeth would have caused all the excited children to throw up.

Continuing on the theme of authenticity, the Blists Hill blog goes on to explain that its new post office has been developed in consultation with the British Postal Museum & Archive.

But it is not true to say, as I heard one visitor claim, that the establishment "had been moved here brick by brick". Such misconceptions will surely grow as the buildings age and begin to look even more authentic.

Do such misconceptions actually matter? If they do, how should they be addressed? Dispelling them is no easy matter given that on-site labelling often destroys any illusion of time and place in the minds of the visitors.

This sense of make-believe is paramount to a place like Blists Hill. It is a fantasy that has been brilliantly enhanced by the Canal Street development. Its new visitor centre proves, however, that it is possible to introduce a critical edge.

Now that this has been established the challenge is to take this further. What better chance to test this out than by drawing further attention to The Miners' Tragedy to mark the bicentenary of the local Madeley pit disaster in January 2010?

Stuart Burch lectures in museum studies at Nottingham Trent University