Black Country Living Museum: Langer’s Army & Navy Stores recreated

Langer’s Army & Navy Stores, which was located on Enville Street in Stourbridge for many years, closed its doors some years back but it has now been brought back to life.

Visitors will be able to meet the new costumed character actors at the Dudley museum tasked with playing the store’s founder Herbert Langer, a former German Prisoner of War who set up the military surplus store in the 1950s after settling in the Black Country.

Mr Langer died in 2004, aged 79, and the Stourbridge shop building was demolished to make way for retirement homes.

A historic character portrays 'Herbert Langer', the owner of Langer's Army & Navy Stores. (Image: Black Country Living Museum)

Mr Langer's son Steve, however, continues to trade at the Surplus and Outdoors shop on Comberton Hill in Kidderminster.

The Langer family have been instrumental in ensuring that the museum, and the staff members portraying Herbert, are doing him proud.

Langer's Army and Navy Stores, Stourbridge (Image: Image held by Stourbridge Library)

Steve said: “My dad would have been so emotional and overwhelmed that someone thought that much of him to do something like this and recreate something that was his life and that he loved.

"It feels like my dad’s shop. It feels like coming home.”

The recreated Langer's Army and Navy Stores (Image: Black Country Living Museum)

The military surplus store is one of three brand new shops recreated as part of the open-air museum’s flourishing new 1940s-50s Forging Ahead development which is now almost complete.

The store had distinctive signage featuring a soldier, sailor and airman, plus large outdoor displays of goods that would take hours for Mr Langer to put up and take down.

A large array of military surplus became available in the years after World War II and the Korean War, which led to a boom in the trade of military surplus.