Content in a Lost Land

Had I made a list a couple of weeks ago of the most alluring places in the glorious county of Shropshire, I doubt if I would have put Craven Arms in the first 19. Or even perhaps in the first 38. It's mostly a drab, utilitarian network of grid pattern streets just off the A49 and the Manchester to Newport railway. Down the road is Stokesay Castle - a sequence of castle, exuberant wood and timber gatehouse and church - which people come miles to see. But Craven Arms itself? Handy place to catch a train from. But little to see. Why bother?

But now, down one of these drab grid pattern streets, in the old market hall, there's been added to Craven Arms a place called Stella Mitchell's Land of Lost Content. It migrated to Shropshire from Chichester, which enabled Stella and Dave Mitchell to find a title for it in the AE Housman poem, A Shropshire Lad: "That is the land of lost content / I see it shining plain / The happy highways where I went / And cannot come again." They might equally have called it The Way We Lived Then. And there's a further plangent, insistent subtext here: fings ain't wot they used t' be.

It's a kind of anthology of the 20th century, built on more than 30 years of assiduous assembling, much of it from such humble sources as car boot sales and skips, of the treasures, tools, preoccupations, distractions and general baggage of everyday life. To those who have lived through half or more of the 20th century, the main emotion here is nostalgia - nostalgia above all perhaps for the acquisitions that seemed at the time so thrilling and now look so demeaningly obsolete: the clunking wireless sets, the tiny televisions, a 1980s Commodore computer.

Yet these rooms must also be fascinating for any intelligent child. Was it really like that? Did you really go out dancing in a dress like that, grandma? Did your family really sit in the evenings playing Escalado the thrilling action race game, while that soupy music crooned away on your Dansette player?

Did you really all rock with hilarity when Mother fetched from the cupboard a game called Impertinent Questions, The Mirth Maker That Sets The World Laughing (with a picture on the box of the globe, close to splitting its sides)? Did the week's washing really involve an object that looks like a tank with a mangle attached to the top of it? Did you really have to submit to a dentist who powered his drill by pedaling away with his foot?

There are sharp, evocative comments attached to the showcases, which sometimes chide the observer a bit. "In honor," says one, "of all those who went before; who lived much harder lives than the children of today can ever imagine and yet seem to have known a 'content' that we have lost along the way somewhere."

And indeed the new possessions we used to unwrap with such innocent excitement look so meager here, in an age when many children receive on a single birthday as much as their grandparents did all through their childhood.

What the Mitchells are doing chimes in with a developing trend in the writing of history to rescue the domestic and elevate it alongside the wars and the crises and the behavior of statesmen. You can see that in the huge success of David Kynaston's recently published book, Austerity Britain, or in the recent acceleration of interest in the archives of Mass Observation, so effectively mined by Victoria Wood for her Bafta-winning Housewife, 49.

Yet perhaps the most potent effect of this place - which I think will stay with me longer than the persistent message that for all its privations the past was a happier time than today - comes at the moment you leave it. For the past isn't, as LP Hartley asserted in the endlessly quoted line from The Go-Between, "another country" at all: it breathes all the time through our own. We wonder at these survivals now: coming generations will wonder in much the same way at what surrounds us today.

So after this hour locked in the past, the drab, utilitarian grid-patterned streets seem transformed: the lettering of the names on the shop fronts, the fruit and veg on the greengrocer's slab, the posters for The Last King of Scotland outside the DVD shop, seem suddenly full of color and life. The Land of Lost Content teaches you to treasure the everyday, the unremarked upon, the taken for granted. And even to find it contenting.

· For opening hours telephone 01588 676176.