Between 1937 and 1940, the people of Bolton found themselves being watched and photographed going about their everyday lives: at football matches, shopping, in pubs and cinemas, even at funerals.
They may not have known it, but they were part of the Mass Observation study, a research project set up in 1937 to document everyday life in Britain. It was conducted by paid and volunteer observers who surreptitiously recorded how people looked, spoke and behaved.
Bolton was designated Worktown for the purposes of the project and more than 1,000 photographs were taken by the photographer Humphrey Spender, most of which Bolton Museum and Archive Service acquired in the 1990s. The museum now has its first permanent section devoted to Mass Observation pictures, which are regularly changed.
"We are able to draw out different aspects of the material. The first display looks at leisure," says Matthew Constantine, the senior manager of Bolton's museum and archives collections.
"There are fantastic photographs of Burnden Park, Bolton Wanderers' football ground at the time, where tens of thousands of people watched the team play every Saturday," he says. 'The idea was to capture genuine emotion and reaction, so the photographs show people watching the match or a film rather than the activity itself."
Spender eventually gave up his Mass Observation work because he thought it was intrusive. While it has parallels with other initiatives of the time such as the magazine Picture Post, and influenced the development of photojournalism, it can seem voyeuristic today.
But the aims of the project are defended by Dorothy Sheridan, the director of the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, which acquired the archive in 1970 and opened it as a public resource. "There is a misconception that it was all middle- and upper-class southern men, but this wasn't the case. There were northerners, women and working- class observers too," says Sheridan.
Also, there are echoes of how social history and contemporary cultures are collected and interpreted in museums and in online galleries today. "Volunteers wrote diaries, and this prefigures oral history in a sense," points out Sheridan. "It was very different from anything else at the time because they firmly believed that ordinary people could and should write their own histories."
The Mass Observation Archive was collected in the spirit of social science and not for historical or nostalgic purposes, adds Sheridan. 'They didn't talk much about archiving; they were collecting in the here and now."
Mass Observation continues today with its contributors writing about current social concerns such as ethical shopping and gardening, while the archive provides rich pickings for writers, film and documentary directors, prop makers and designers. In some ways the 1930s observers and diarists were like today's bloggers, says Sheridan.
"What is fascinating is that the material is now used in ways that weren't explicit in the original project, and attitudes to gender, media, war, race and class are brought out."
Many museums have borrowed material for exhibitions including Tate Britain, the Imperial War Museum and the Holocaust Museum
in the US. Sheridan would like to see curators make more use
of the archive.
"Curators could use it for room re-creations. We have a huge archive on how people lived and what places such as shops, meeting rooms and cinemas looked like as well as domestic interiors."
Museums are in the business of interpreting contemporary culture and a one-day conference in Bolton next month will look at issues around collecting leisure history.
Recording Leisure Lives: Histories, Archives and Memories of Leisure in 20th-century Britain will be hosted by the University of Bolton with Bolton Museum and Archive Service in partnership with the Leisure Studies Association.
"People like looking at photographs of other people, but the challenge is how you explain the context of how they were created," says Constantine, who will be speaking at the conference. "With the Spender archive we are trying to show the comparisons and contrasts with the town of Bolton today and to reflect social changes.
"Football was part of the town's identity - the ground was surrounded by terraced streets, whereas now Bolton play at the Reebok Stadium in an out-of-town retail park where there are shops and cinemas and burger restaurants. Shopping is now a leisure pursuit alongside football."
An obvious challenge for museums collecting contemporary culture is that much of the material is still in use or in private hands. "People understandably don't want to part with treasured possessions, though they are generally happy to loan objects," says Paul Gallagher, the curator of contemporary collecting at the Museum of Liverpool, which will open in 2010.
"This works particularly well with temporary exhibitions. A good proportion of material gathered for our forthcoming exhibition about the history of popular music in Liverpool, The Beat Goes On, has been sourced this way.
For example, we have Frankie Vaughan's straw boater on loan. In many ways it's his trademark, but understandably his widow would not want to part with it permanently. And we are also hoping to borrow Echo, the drum machine used by Echo and the Bunnymen, but it's tricky because the band are still using it."
One of the new museum's galleries, Creative City, will look at leisure pursuits such as sport, writing and music. "Contemporary collections require contemporary collecting methods, where oral and video histories play an important role," says Gallagher.
A film about young boxers in the city, Boxing Clever, for example, records a relatively neglected sport from a grassroots viewpoint. "It looks at how a community comes together, the discipline of boxing and the amazing camaraderie between boxers."
"There will be two theatrical areas or immersive experiences dedicated to Liverpool's twin passions, football and music, where visitors can take a emotional journey," says Gallagher.
"Again, you have to strike a balance between the local and national story and be aware of how the story comes across to an American visitor, say, or someone who isn't interested in football," Gallagher explains.
"We are using the match-day experience as a means of understanding how football and fandom operates within the city, how people feel about it and what it says about the city and its attitude. People's voices carry a lot of emotion and are a powerful tool in museums. There's no substitute."
This "intangible heritage" will be balanced with traditional objects that can be hard to find. One way is to contact fans. "This has the benefit of building relationships," says Gallagher. "We want them to tell their own story and tell us what they want to see in that section."
Outside football, sports are under-represented in museums. Surfing, for example, has no permanent venue. The National Maritime Museum Cornwall ran a temporary touring exhibition in 2005/06, Surf's Up, with mostly loaned objects and now wants to start a permanent collection in the county.
The museum has put in an application to Heritage Lottery Fund's Collecting Cultures initiative, a £3m project to support acquisitions, curatorial skills and research.
"There is a wealth of objects relating to surfing's heritage, but you never get a complete picture because they are stashed away in attics and storerooms," says Ben Lumby, the exhibitions manager at the maritime museum.
Peter Robinson has the only dedicated collection of surfing history in the UK. The Surfing Museum was founded in 2004 in makeshift premises in Brighton and has toured for three years.
Robinson acquired the collection through purchasing on the open market, donations or deals with private collectors, and hopes to open a permanent museum by 2010. "The plan at the moment is to be included in a Surf Dome that is due to open in London in 2010," he says.
Robinson says surfing has a longer history than we might imagine and it's vital that people understand its past for the ongoing health of this unique pastime.
"Surfing dates back thousands of years in Polynesia and it was Britons who first wrote about it as long ago as 1769," he says. "We are also looking at now and the future, with partnerships with environmental groups educating visitors about sustainable living and the protection of the ocean and beach environment. History is happening right now."
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist.
The Recording Leisure Lives: Histories, Archives and Memories of Leisure in 20th-century Britain conference is on 18 March. Details at www.bolton.ac.uk/conferences/leisurelives/
They may not have known it, but they were part of the Mass Observation study, a research project set up in 1937 to document everyday life in Britain. It was conducted by paid and volunteer observers who surreptitiously recorded how people looked, spoke and behaved.
Bolton was designated Worktown for the purposes of the project and more than 1,000 photographs were taken by the photographer Humphrey Spender, most of which Bolton Museum and Archive Service acquired in the 1990s. The museum now has its first permanent section devoted to Mass Observation pictures, which are regularly changed.
"We are able to draw out different aspects of the material. The first display looks at leisure," says Matthew Constantine, the senior manager of Bolton's museum and archives collections.
"There are fantastic photographs of Burnden Park, Bolton Wanderers' football ground at the time, where tens of thousands of people watched the team play every Saturday," he says. 'The idea was to capture genuine emotion and reaction, so the photographs show people watching the match or a film rather than the activity itself."
Spender eventually gave up his Mass Observation work because he thought it was intrusive. While it has parallels with other initiatives of the time such as the magazine Picture Post, and influenced the development of photojournalism, it can seem voyeuristic today.
But the aims of the project are defended by Dorothy Sheridan, the director of the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, which acquired the archive in 1970 and opened it as a public resource. "There is a misconception that it was all middle- and upper-class southern men, but this wasn't the case. There were northerners, women and working- class observers too," says Sheridan.
Also, there are echoes of how social history and contemporary cultures are collected and interpreted in museums and in online galleries today. "Volunteers wrote diaries, and this prefigures oral history in a sense," points out Sheridan. "It was very different from anything else at the time because they firmly believed that ordinary people could and should write their own histories."
The Mass Observation Archive was collected in the spirit of social science and not for historical or nostalgic purposes, adds Sheridan. 'They didn't talk much about archiving; they were collecting in the here and now."
Mass Observation continues today with its contributors writing about current social concerns such as ethical shopping and gardening, while the archive provides rich pickings for writers, film and documentary directors, prop makers and designers. In some ways the 1930s observers and diarists were like today's bloggers, says Sheridan.
"What is fascinating is that the material is now used in ways that weren't explicit in the original project, and attitudes to gender, media, war, race and class are brought out."
Many museums have borrowed material for exhibitions including Tate Britain, the Imperial War Museum and the Holocaust Museum
in the US. Sheridan would like to see curators make more use
of the archive.
"Curators could use it for room re-creations. We have a huge archive on how people lived and what places such as shops, meeting rooms and cinemas looked like as well as domestic interiors."
Museums are in the business of interpreting contemporary culture and a one-day conference in Bolton next month will look at issues around collecting leisure history.
Recording Leisure Lives: Histories, Archives and Memories of Leisure in 20th-century Britain will be hosted by the University of Bolton with Bolton Museum and Archive Service in partnership with the Leisure Studies Association.
"People like looking at photographs of other people, but the challenge is how you explain the context of how they were created," says Constantine, who will be speaking at the conference. "With the Spender archive we are trying to show the comparisons and contrasts with the town of Bolton today and to reflect social changes.
"Football was part of the town's identity - the ground was surrounded by terraced streets, whereas now Bolton play at the Reebok Stadium in an out-of-town retail park where there are shops and cinemas and burger restaurants. Shopping is now a leisure pursuit alongside football."
An obvious challenge for museums collecting contemporary culture is that much of the material is still in use or in private hands. "People understandably don't want to part with treasured possessions, though they are generally happy to loan objects," says Paul Gallagher, the curator of contemporary collecting at the Museum of Liverpool, which will open in 2010.
"This works particularly well with temporary exhibitions. A good proportion of material gathered for our forthcoming exhibition about the history of popular music in Liverpool, The Beat Goes On, has been sourced this way.
For example, we have Frankie Vaughan's straw boater on loan. In many ways it's his trademark, but understandably his widow would not want to part with it permanently. And we are also hoping to borrow Echo, the drum machine used by Echo and the Bunnymen, but it's tricky because the band are still using it."
One of the new museum's galleries, Creative City, will look at leisure pursuits such as sport, writing and music. "Contemporary collections require contemporary collecting methods, where oral and video histories play an important role," says Gallagher.
A film about young boxers in the city, Boxing Clever, for example, records a relatively neglected sport from a grassroots viewpoint. "It looks at how a community comes together, the discipline of boxing and the amazing camaraderie between boxers."
"There will be two theatrical areas or immersive experiences dedicated to Liverpool's twin passions, football and music, where visitors can take a emotional journey," says Gallagher.
"Again, you have to strike a balance between the local and national story and be aware of how the story comes across to an American visitor, say, or someone who isn't interested in football," Gallagher explains.
"We are using the match-day experience as a means of understanding how football and fandom operates within the city, how people feel about it and what it says about the city and its attitude. People's voices carry a lot of emotion and are a powerful tool in museums. There's no substitute."
This "intangible heritage" will be balanced with traditional objects that can be hard to find. One way is to contact fans. "This has the benefit of building relationships," says Gallagher. "We want them to tell their own story and tell us what they want to see in that section."
Outside football, sports are under-represented in museums. Surfing, for example, has no permanent venue. The National Maritime Museum Cornwall ran a temporary touring exhibition in 2005/06, Surf's Up, with mostly loaned objects and now wants to start a permanent collection in the county.
The museum has put in an application to Heritage Lottery Fund's Collecting Cultures initiative, a £3m project to support acquisitions, curatorial skills and research.
"There is a wealth of objects relating to surfing's heritage, but you never get a complete picture because they are stashed away in attics and storerooms," says Ben Lumby, the exhibitions manager at the maritime museum.
Peter Robinson has the only dedicated collection of surfing history in the UK. The Surfing Museum was founded in 2004 in makeshift premises in Brighton and has toured for three years.
Robinson acquired the collection through purchasing on the open market, donations or deals with private collectors, and hopes to open a permanent museum by 2010. "The plan at the moment is to be included in a Surf Dome that is due to open in London in 2010," he says.
Robinson says surfing has a longer history than we might imagine and it's vital that people understand its past for the ongoing health of this unique pastime.
"Surfing dates back thousands of years in Polynesia and it was Britons who first wrote about it as long ago as 1769," he says. "We are also looking at now and the future, with partnerships with environmental groups educating visitors about sustainable living and the protection of the ocean and beach environment. History is happening right now."
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist.
The Recording Leisure Lives: Histories, Archives and Memories of Leisure in 20th-century Britain conference is on 18 March. Details at www.bolton.ac.uk/conferences/leisurelives/
