The Wakes Weeks Pop Up Museum: Robert Leach & Uncultured Creatives presented in partnership with Showtown Museum Blackpool.

With the introduction of the railways in Victorian times, the traditional Wakes Weeks were when millworkers would don their Sunday best and crowd onto trains and head for seaside resorts like Blackpool for their annual holiday. Working with academic and historian Robert Leach and Showtown, Blackpool we commissioned Uncultured Creatives to design a pop up museum experience to house a curated selection of prints and ephemera to celebrating the tradition of Blackpool Wakes weeks.

Robert has built up a personal archive, over 50 years, of photographs, postcards, cartes de visite, stereoviews, ephemera and publications from his home town of Blackpool spanning the period from the 1860s to the present-day, with a particular focus on the working classes at play in the resort in the timespan 1900-1939. Our pop up museum experience will travel to festivals and events across Lancashire throughout 2024 & 2025, visiting schools and care homes along the way, gathering more stories and memories of wakes weeks before being turned into an online archive exhibition on the Lancashire Textile Gallery website at www.lancashiretextilegallery.com

Over the next year we’ll be touring the tent and exhibition to family festivals, care homes and community events, so if you’d be interested in seeing us pop up at an event or residential setting near you, please get in touch with zara@britishtextilebiennial.co.uk