Go to slide:
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
Rochdale Local Studies and Archives and the Co-operative Heritage Trust manage and care for many historic archival documents. These documents have grown over time through generous donations and purchases and the resources reflect the innovative and radical town of Rochdale.
With funding from the Arts Council England and central government, Rochdale Local Studies, Your Trust and the Co-op Archives at the Co-operative Heritage Trust are embarking on an exciting project to involve members of the local community in researching, interpreting and making the collections more accessible to the wider community. The project has just begun and will run to Sept 2026 culminating in an exhibition outside the Town Hall.
The archives held by both YT and CHT still need considerable work to bring them up to the standards required for them to be properly understood, accessed and used or engaged with beyond pure research. Some of these materials are in need of urgent conservation work, and much could be digitised.
After an open day to introduce our heritage and the volunteer task, we now have a group of volunteers who are new to archives and keen to learn new skills such as conservation and heritage skills, digitisation, cleaning and listing documents correctly. This will help us ‘Unlock’ the collections and make them more visible to all. Whilst helping us to unlock the collections, they will be finding untold stories and showcasing the findings in an exhibition at the end of the project.
During the first month, the volunteers have looked at the archives at Rochdale and Manchester and been shown basic heritage skills and have been given a cleaning workshop by the conservator at Central Library. They have had tours of nearby sites such as the Rochdale Pioneers museum, Hollingworth lake and Rochdale Town Hall providing information about the history of Rochdale.
The volunteers will help to make collections more accessible as they continue to work on during the year and this will enabling joint archival, cataloguing and interpretation work to be undertaken in a way we never have before to tell the story of our local history and contemporary relevance in a new way.
Between our organisations, we hold archives which capture and celebrate Rochdale’s history including a quantity of material reflects the town and borough as the birthplace of the Co-operative Movement and its national and global development. Themes include the promotion of education, development of the working classes, and peace and anti-discrimination in society.
Archives include letters written by John Bright MP, material relating to the development of UK co-operatives which includes the business records of retail consumer societies which have their origin in the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society, records on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, The Rochdale Town Hall archives, material relating to the Co-operative Union/press and The Rachde Kronikul, a reform and dialect publication from 1853.
There is much within the collections that is not known about and we are excited to discover and make available for all!