News from Lancashire Archives & Local History

Winter in Lancashire

Season’s greetings from Red Rose Collections. To celebrate the season, we have brought together a small selection of photographs from Red Rose Collections featuring winter scenes from around the county across a century. What will this winter bring for Lancashire? We wonder if any of these scenes from years past will be […]

All Aboard! – Railways in Lancashire

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 […]

Made in Lancashire… Say Cheese

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 […]

Not just Blackpool…

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 […]

Lancashire’s Covid 19 Archive

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 […]

Escape Lockdown

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 […]

Gawthorpe Hall and VE Day

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. […]

Miraculous Escapes

The signature image of our photo collection in Red Rose Collections is of a bizarre rail accident that happened in Accrington on September 26th 1899 […]

Sam Thompson’s Lost Lancaster

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 […]

From Cooper to Photographer – Edmundson Buck

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 […]

The Oldest Woman in Silverdale

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 […]

Discovery… the third reason for digitization

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 […]

The ‘Mr. Chorley’ Collection

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 […]

Finding Aunt Lizzie

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 […]

Three months on… we’ve been busy

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 […]

The First War Photographer

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 […]

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