An Enduring Connection: The Academic Partnership between the IES and Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery

In February of 2024, I received a request from the Muhammad Bin Qassim Library Sujawal, District Sujawal, Sindh, Pakistan. The library was interested in a copy of a book I had published in 2021, A British Book Collector, on the R. E. Hart Collection of manuscripts and rare books held by the Blackburn Museum and Library in Blackburn, Lancashire. This interchange with the Muhammad Qassim Library reminded me of the impact and range of the academic partnership between the IES and the Blackburn Museum. The partnership has been in place since 2013 which is almost half the lifetime of the IES itself. The idea was suggested to me by the then Curator for History of the museum, Vinai Solanki, in 2012. Vinai despaired that the Hart Collection, despite his best efforts, remained a ‘hidden’ collection. He’d welcomed only three academic visitors since taking up his post in 2007. We resolved to change this to benefit not only the academic community, but the community of Blackburn as well. Our template for change chimed with the role of the IES in connecting researchers and communities across the UK and beyond.

We began in 2013 with a small exhibition in Senate House Library of ten Blackburn medieval and early modern manuscripts and books supported by a small AHRC Collaboration Grant as well as the donation of cases and Perspex cradles from the British Library. A conference and a catalogue helped to put the exhibition on the map. This led to a collaboration with Dr Jack Hartnell, then at the Courtauld. Jack and I pitched a much larger exhibition of material from a group of museums in the North West to 2 Temple Place (https://twotempleplace.org/culture-community/exhibitions/) as part of their annual exhibition series. This resulted in ‘Cotton to Gold: Extraordinary Collections of the Industrial North West’ which ran from January-April 2015. Medieval manuscripts and early printed books from the Hart Collection along with watercolours by JMW Turner, Japanese prints, and a collection of jewel-like dried beetles from across the globe represented the Blackburn Museum. The Haworth Museum in Accrington lent Tiffany glass from its collection; the largest collection of Tiffany glass in Europe. Drawings by John Everett Millais, original artwork for illustrations of late nineteenth-century children’s books from the Hardcastle Collection and taxidermy from the Booth Collection came from the Towneley Hall Museum in Burnley. 

This show captured the imagination of the press particularly with regard to the ‘hidden’ or one might say historically underfunded and under-valued museums of the North West. The Independent commented that ‘What visitors to ‘Cotton to Gold’ will take away is…that there of hundreds of such smaller museums and galleries conserving local legacies of world-class importance’. Apollo’s reviewer noted that:

You get a clear view of the obsessive curiosity- the need to gather, categorise, understand- which animated Britain’s middle and upper classes during the age of Empire. But most striking to me is the notion of community presented.

But perhaps the greatest change in the appreciation of the value of these collections came from the contemporary community of Blackburn itself. The MP for Blackburn at the time was Jack Straw who was unaware of the importance of the collections held in the museum just a block away from the City Hall. A visit to the museum from then chief executive of Arts Council England, Sir Peter Bazelgette, following the exhibition and a meeting with the Blackburn Council further highlighted the cultural importance of the Hart Collection.

We held an international conference, ‘Something for my Native Town’ in Blackburn in 2017. The proceedings were published in 2021 in A British Book Collector (UoL Press). A Paul Mellon Exhibition Grant in 2018 made it possible for me to curate an exhibition at the Blackburn Museum on other rare book collections created during the first half of the twentieth century by collectors whose lives began towards the close of the Victorian era and end with the Second World War: James Dunn of Blackburn (1857-1943)(Blackburn Central Library), John Henry Spencer (1875-1952) and Joseph Pomfret (1878-1944) both of Preston (The Harris Museum), and Edwin James Hardcastle (1876-1920) of Halifax (Towneley Hall Museum). The exhibition was only open for a few weeks before the museum closed during lockdown in March 2020. The exhibition survived though through a series of 47 blog posts I wrote for the museum: https://blackburnmuseum.org.uk/blog/holding-the-vision-collecting-the-art-of-the-book-in-the-industrial-north-west/.

In 2017, the Being Human Festival played a major role in sustaining community interest and supporting further research into the life of R. E. Hart. Being Human funded playwright Chris Adams and director Will Maynard for the writing and production of Chris’ play, ‘Finding Mr Hart’. Chris used archival evidence held by the museum to inform the piece, which was performed in the Blackburn Cotton Exchange, a Victorian structure in the centre of Blackburn currently undergoing renovation. It was enthusiastically received by the community on a cold winter’s night in an unheated venue!

In 2022, the museum had success with their bid for ACE’s National Portfolio Organisation status. This major funding has enabled the museum to open for additional hours and to hire new members of staff. My role as part of the NPO is to curate a major exhibition for the museum entitled ‘The Nature of Gothic’. The exhibition has been in development since April 2023 for delivery in September 2025. 

This exhibition will juxtapose objects from a variety of mediums from the medieval and the Victorian Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts movements to explore the use of decorative motifs and techniques across time periods and religious affiliations. The decorative motifs highlighted in this exhibition focus on representations of the natural world with text and illustrations surrounded by vines and flowers, trees and animals. The objects on display will juxtapose medieval Islamic and Christian manuscripts with books produced by William Morris’ Kelmscott Press; medieval textiles used for religious regalia and Arts and Crafts textiles created for secular purposes; medieval tiles and Arts and Crafts lustreware, and medieval book illuminations and Pre-Raphaelite paintings. 

Each of the objects displayed from Blackburn’s collections of medieval manuscripts, Early Modern and Arts and Crafts books and Royal Pilkington lustreware will be ‘matched’ by a loaned object. The exhibition will also include contemporary art which responds to the themes of the show. Blackburn artist Jamie Holman (https://jamieholman.com/)is producing a modern addition to the Victorian collection of the John Ryland’s ‘Tregaskis’ bindings for the exhibition. In reversing the historic manufacturing model, the binding will be created using flax grown in Blackburn and Jamie’s design for it will be embroidered by artists in Islamabad. This follows on from Jamie’s residency with the Islamabad based artists’ collective, Art of Small Talk, in September 2024 supported by the British Council.

Loans are in process with a wide variety of museums across the UK: the British Library, Cambridge University Library, Gawthorpe Hall Textiles Collection, the De Morgan Foundation, the John Rylands Library, the Harris Museum, Chetham’s Library, Tullie House Museum and the Manchester Art Gallery. 

The British Library will be loaning six medieval manuscripts for the exhibition and a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam written and decorated by William Morris with marginal cameos by Edward Burne-Jones. The medieval manuscripts include one of the Library’s national treasures: the fifteenth-century Bedford Psalter and Hours illuminated by Herman Scheere. The loan comprises what the British Library believe is their biggest ever UK loan.

The Manchester Art Gallery has agreed to loan an iconic Rossetti painting, Astarte Syriaca. The Harris Museum in Preston is loaning the Haslam Bequest Psalter, once owned by John Ruskin. This thirteenth-century manuscript with notes and drawings by Ruskin highlights the links between the Pre-Raphaelites, particularly Morris, and the medieval book. The loan from Cambridge University Library will reunite the Hart Collection for the first time since the Cambridge manuscripts were bequested to the library upon Hart’s death in 1946. 

Many, many collaborations across the GLAM sector have emerged from the academic partnership between the Blackburn Museum and the IES. One of the most exciting for me was that with contemporary ceramic artist, Nehal Aamir https://www.instagram.com/nehal_aamir/?hl=en for Blackburn’s Festival of Making in June 2024. Nehal produced a commissioned piece of work for the Festival in which she responded to her residency at the Darwen Terracotta Company. As part of that experience, I worked with Nehal by showing her the medieval and Islamic material in the Hart collection. In the friezes that Nehal produced for the Festival of Making, she used nimbed ceramicists to bring the artistic practice of the Middle Ages to the factory floor of the twenty-first century. 

The reach and impact of the IES and Blackburn Academic Partnership has exceeded far beyond what we imagined in 2012. Our collaboration demonstrates what can be achieved through research, time and trust. 

The Nature of Gothic: Reflecting the Natural World in historic and contemporary artistic practice 

Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, Museum Street, Blackburn BB1 7AJ

12th September 2025 – 19th December 2025