In 1709 Abraham Darby worked out how to smelt iron with coke instead of charcoal at Coalbrookdale, and the Gorge never looked back. Today it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site holding ten museums, a recreated Victorian town, and the bridge that started it all.
Each site sits within walking or cycling distance of the next along the river — an annual passport ticket works out cheaper than paying per museum if you're staying more than a day.
Cross the world's first cast-iron bridge, still spanning the Severn exactly as it did in 1779, then step into the old Tollhouse to see what it cost the Queen to cross.
A working recreation of an 1900s industrial town — costumed shopkeepers, a working foundry, a fairground, and a coal mine you can walk straight into.
An interactive engineering museum built inside a former ironworks — pull a real locomotive, dam a river, and build a robot before lunch.
Set in the original bottle kilns beside the Coalport canal basin, tracing Shropshire's porcelain trade from delicate teacups to global export.
Once the world's biggest decorative tile works — wander galleries tiled floor to ceiling in Victorian pattern and colour.
A clay-pipe factory abandoned by its workers in 1957 and left almost exactly as they found it — aprons still on the hooks.
Housed in the old Severn Warehouse, with a 12-metre model of the river valley and the flood levels marked on the walls.
The former homes of Coalbrookdale's Quaker ironmasters, overlooking the works their families built.
An eerie brick-lined tunnel dug into the hillside, still oozing natural bitumen from the rock.
The ruins of a 12th-century Cistercian abbey, a short drive along the river from the museums.
Buy an Ironbridge Passport ticket if you're visiting more than two sites — it covers all ten museums for a full year.