Centre for Worktown Studies

Mass Observation was established in 1937 by Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings with the objective of producing a detailed record of everyday life in Britain. Its Worktown project adopted Bolton for a study of the industrial working classes which, as Harrisson later noted, were seen by nearly everybody not born into them as ‘almost a race apart’. The study included investigations of work, especially the cotton factory, religion, leisure, domestic economy and customary cultural practises that had survived into industrial modernity.

The Humphrey Spender ‘Worktown’ collection of documentary photographs is held by Bolton Museum and the Centre is jointly established and managed by the University and Bolton Museum and Archive Service. The Collection comprises approximately 800 images taken in Bolton (and Blackpool as the Mass Observation team travelled there to observe ‘Worktowners’ on holiday) and is a social documentary photographic archive of national and international significance. The photographs can be viewed online on Bolton Museum’s ‘Humphrey Spender’s Worktown’ at http://boltonworktown.co.uk/.

All photographs on this webpage are from Bolton Museum's Humphrey Spender Worktown Collection and reproduced by permission of Bolton Council.

Contact information:

For further details please contact

Professor Bob Snape,

r.snape@bolton.ac.uk,

+44 (0)1204 903 609

or

Bethan Atkins

B.Atkins@bolton.ac.uk