On 13th June 2024, Bolton Museum launched its new Worktown exhibition – Class of 1937 and 2023.
The exhibition puts Humphrey Spender’s 1930s photographs in direct conversation with new images taken by pupils from Essa Primary and St Peter and St Paul’s RC Primary Schools, working with community video production company, The Videobox. These images reinterpret and update Spender’s photographs for contemporary Bolton. They are strikingly beautiful and reflect the changes as well as continuities between the town then and now.
Alongside the exhibition, the museum launched a new trail that has been designed by a small group of year 9 students at Ladybridge High School. The trail, and an accompanying website, will be used by primary school children visiting the museum, as they explore what life was like in Bolton before the Second World War.
Both projects were also inspired by the book Class of ’37, by historians Hester Barron and Claire Langhamer. This book explores the lives of a class of girls who attended Pike’s Lane Elementary School in central Bolton in 1937. Over the last two years, the authors have been working with Bolton Museum and local schools to help pupils understand what life was like for their predecessors in the 1930s, and to hear young people talk about what their own lives are like today.
