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 […]

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 […]

Anna White was the Spender Scholar in 2010-2011. She used a range of photographic techniques during the year inspired by Humphrey Spender’s photographs of life in the town. As society’s views have changed quite a lot on how acceptable it is to photograph people undercover and without consent Anna used a collaborative approach.This included setting […]

  These photographs record a visit to Kearsley Golf Club and Manor Golf Club by current Spender scholar Richard Gaskill. The Humphrey Spender Scholarship was set up to create a contemporary response to the Worktown Archive. Richard will be documenting the theme of Sports, Spectacles and Spectators with photographs over the course of the next year culminating in […]

If you’ve been to the Worktown 75th Birthday exhibition at Bolton Museum as well as visiting this site then perhaps you have noticed a design connection between them. Our web designer Perry was inspired by the iconic orange and cream design of the Penguin ‘Specials’ paperbacks and we continued the theme for the exhibition display […]

Stand and Stare’s Mass-Observation Theatre Jukebox is currently on display at FutureEverything’s exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. The jukebox uses photographs from the Worktown Archive and text from the M-O Archive to play stories. Placing images on the jukebox desk activates a projection and audio through radio-frequency transmitter tags implanted […]