Stories from Red Rose Collections

Red Rose Collections Image Archive contains digitised photographs from libraries all over Lancashire and quite a number document the railways in that part of the County. We have now, finally, been able to collate these images in to one collection of nearly nine hundred photographs – Railways in Lancashire. These include dramatic eyewitness shots of […]

This Lancashire Day, the 27 November, we are celebrating all things made in Lancashire, especially cheese. Cheese-making can be found in Lancashire as far back as the 13th Century, and there are records of it being transported from Liverpool to London in the 1600’s. An old Lancashire cheese-maker, ‘pre-Gornall’. But the lack of quantity, consistent […]

As autumn comes and the nights draw in, the mention of the word “Illuminations” immediately brings to mind the extravagant annual display at Blackpool. But it was not always so. Yes, Blackpool’s was the first, begun in 1879, when it consisted of just eight lamps bathing the promenade in ‘artificial sunshine’, but from 1919 it […]

In April 2020, Lancashire Archives launched a project to collect and share the experiences of Lancashire residents during the Covid 19 pandemic. We asked people to send us anything they wanted to share, and we had an incredible response. Poems, diaries, photographs, artwork, videos, sound recordings arrived, sent in by all ages from pre-schoolers to […]

Would you like to escape lockdown? If only in your imagination… And become part of ‘Escape Lockdown’, our remote creative writing project. We have put together some interesting and intriguing historical photographs we hope will inspire your creative side. Use an image on its own as inspiration to produce a creative response, for example a […]

Create your own VE Day newspaper A creative VE day activity for all the family Gawthorpe Hall and VE Day As part of the VE Day commemorations we wanted to share the stories of the Kay-Shuttleworth family of Gawthorpe Hall who served during World War II, in particular those of brothers Richard & Ronald Kay-Shuttleworth. […]

This is the excerpt for your very first post.

Sam Thompson was a Lancaster photographer whose work won acclaim and recognition, nationally and internationally, far beyond the confines of his native city. Sam was born in Scotforth, just to the south of Lancaster, in 1871. His family were farmers in the area providing, in future years, many useful connections for his nostalgic portraits of […]

Clitheroe library holds a collection of eight hundred glass slides of images captured by a local man, Edmundson. The total number he produced is unknown but other photographs appear in postcard form, in various periodicals, local histories and private collections, suggesting he was an extremely prolific photographer of the early twentieth century. Edmundson was born […]