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.
Free Photography Workshop
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 […]
Worktown Observation Centre
‘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 […]
Worktown to Cottonopolis
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 […]
Become an Observer
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 […]
Uncle Bob and his friend Billy
Earlier in the year we decided that looking for each of the locations in the 930 Spender photographs would be far too time consuming for just the two of us, especially as neither of us know Bolton that well, being a Mancunian and a Wiganer. So we decided it would be good to ask you […]
Observing Holidaytown 2012
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 […]
Spender and the Conservative ladies
A small number of Humphrey Spender’s written observations have survived in the Mass-Observation Archive. These texts really bring the photographs to life giving both factual information and an insight into Spender’s experiences photographing in Bolton. The observation below was made at the Conservative Club Rooms, in Farnworth on January 24th 1938 where volunteers were helping […]