A collage created by Julian Trevelyan in 1937 has been acquired by Bolton Library and Museum Service

We finished our day of talks on Mass Observation at Bolton Museum on Saturday by heading over to Blackpool (Holidaytown) in the footsteps of the original Mass Observers. It was good fun to join relatives of original observers Julian Trevelyan, Humphrey Spender and Michael Wickham taking in the Blackpool illuminations and Saturday night mayhem. My […]

Bolton Museum’s exhibition opened on Saturday and is on until 2 December. We are holding an afternoon of talks on the 6 October 12.30-5 pm in the Museum’s beautiful Art Deco lecture theatre followed by a screening of Ian Pott’s film about the Worktown observers “Truth is Stranger than Fiction”. Everything is free, everyone is welcome […]

Colonel Barker by Humphrey Spender (copyright Bolton MBC) The sideshow featured Colonel Barker in bed in a pit separated from a woman wearing a nightdress in an another bed by a row of belisha beacons. Scandal loving tourists could view the scene from above, and rain insults down on the unfortunate couple. Although the advertising […]

Artist Julian Trevelyan was part of the team of Mass-Observers in Bolton. Tom Harrisson, leader of the Worktown survey at the time, asked him and other artists to paint and draw in the streets of the town. Trevelyan was inspired by Surrealism at the time and used collage to record the street scenes in the […]