Stories from Red Rose Collections

Views of North Lancashire in 1901 This week we are celebrating the re-opening of Silverdale library, so it seemed appropriate to revisit the images we have of Silverdale in Red Rose Collections. There are just over two hundred, and half of these are from a single collection of rare glass plates photographed by Owen Graystone […]

Lancashire Libraries have been digitizing their photo collections and adding them to Red Rose Collections for two main reasons, Preservation and Accessibility. Photographic images consist of a mix of volatile chemicals forming the emulsion on a photo print. Inevitably, over time, these chemicals continue to react, breakdown and so the image deteriorates. And, if these […]

A life devoted to a place and its people. In the year 2000, Lancashire archives and libraries received seventy eight boxes of local history material connected to Chorley and the surrounding area. Seventeen of those boxes were full of photographs depicting people, places and events in the area over a century and this collection belonged […]

Take some old photographs, keen volunteers and some serious local history detective work in the available surviving records… and a wealth of stories about people and places can be uncovered. A few years ago, preparations were being made for a major refurbishment of Lancaster library. This called for a big clear out and, during this […]

It’s now three months since we launched Red Rose Collections… and we’ve been busy! Who? Where? When? You may have noticed that some of the photos on our collections are missing information about who, where and when? There are two reason for this One reason is we just haven’t had time to add all the […]

Our featured collection this month is Incidents from Camp Life, Crimea 1855 Photography was developed during the early decades of the nineteenth century and was only ‘perfected’ and available for widespread use after 1839. A few daguerreotype photos were taken during the US Mexico War (1846-1848) but the first systematic photographic coverage of a conflict […]