For a year now we have been inviting visitors to the current exhibition in the Worktown Gallery to take part in an activity that evokes the original participatory spirit of Mass Observation. One of the founders of Mass Observation was a poet and journalist called Charles Madge.  In the first year or two of Mass […]

The Museum of Takeaway Menu Art will be visiting the Worktown Observation Centre, on Knowsley Street on 27 July, and will be accepting menus. You find out more about the event by visiting www.worktownobservation.co.uk/ or visit MoTMA.

Gander, Photo Book Workshop, 2-5pm, 31 August Join Robert Parkinson of Preston is my Paris to make your own photo book about Bolton. The workshop will include a short tour of Bolton to collect photographs which you will use to make a book about how you see the town. This event is free and suitable […]

‘The Observers are the cameras with which we are trying to photograph contemporary life’ We would like to invite photographers, writers and artists of all types to participate in a unique project inspired by Mass Observation.  The Worktown Observation Centre will be open in Bolton 26 July to 2 August, in an empty shop space […]

A guided tour round some of the Bolton pubs featured in Mass Observation’s Worktown study and the book ‘The Pub and the People’. The tour is free but places are limited- please book by emailing worktownobservation@gmail.com.The Worktown Observation Centre will be observing Bolton 26 July to 2 August. www.worktownobservation.co.uk

Join a special Worktown inspired event being put on for the Manchester Histories Festival. A day long workshop based upon the Mass Observation archive of everyday working-class life in Bolton in the late nineteen-thirties. Explore the working and social lives of a Lancashire cotton town. Learn about Bolton Museum’s Humphrey Spender’s Worktown Collection and his contribution […]

Mass Observation photography exhibition featuring Worktown photography by Humphrey Spender. August 2 to 29 September 2013. Admission free

Would you like to become an observer? The Mass Observation Archive are asking for volunteers to keep a day diary on 12th May 2013. In 1937 Mass Observation called for people from all parts of the UK to record everything they did from when they woke up in the morning to when they went to […]

From Saturday 9th March to  Sunday 25th May The theme for this year’s Humphrey Spender John Marriot Scholarship for Social Documentary Photography is ‘Sports, Spectacles and Spectators’. This scholarship is supported by Bolton Le Moors Rotary Club and the University of Bolton. Throughout the Scholarship, photographer Richard Gaskill will explore the interwoven layers of emotion […]

Radio 4  ran an interesting feature yesterday about the Worktown photographs and Bolton Museum’s work to find out more about them. You can listen again on http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p015kmr4