News Archive

On 7 April 2009 the University of Bolton and Bolton Museum will be presenting their second annual conference on the history of leisure in twentieth century Britain.

The conference, Recording Leisure Lives: Sports, Games and Pastimes in 20th Century Britain, is inspired by the pictures of Bolton taken in the 1930s by renowned photographer, Humphrey Spender, for the Mass Observation movement.

A permanent display of the pictures can be seen at Bolton Museum’s Worktown gallery. Taken from the Museum’s collection of more than 1100 images and negatives by Spender, the pictures show scenes of everyday life for 1930s Boltonians and offer a unique insight into the experiences of working class people at the time.

Dr Bob Snape, University of Bolton Reader in Leisure and Sport, said: 'Humphrey Spender’s images of everyday life in Bolton in the 1930s show the importance of normal and ordinary activities to our understanding of the ways in which people lived in the past. Recording Leisure Lives 2009 is firmly based upon this principle and will explore how sport, games and pastimes formed part of the lives of people in Bolton and beyond during the twentieth century.’

The conference, in partnership with the Leisure Studies Association, is open to anyone with an interest in social history and photography as well as academics, writers, archivists and amateur historians.

Recording Leisure Lives: Sports, Games and Pastimes in 20th Century Britain will be held on Tuesday 7 April 2009 at Bolton Museum. For a full conference outline or to book a place please visit http://www.bolton.ac.uk/conferences/leisurelives or contact Bethan Atkins via e-mail at B.Atkins@bolton.ac.uk.

Please submit proposals for conference papers to R.Snape@bolton.ac.uk| and to H.Pussard@roehampton.ac.uk| by 16th January 2009.

Image: On the bowling green of the pub
(Photograph by Humphrey Spender. Copyright Bolton Council from the Bolton Museum & Archive collection.)