Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery
Encyclopedia
Blackburn with Darwen
Blackburn with Darwen is a unitary authority area in Lancashire, North West England. It consists of Blackburn, the small town of Darwen to the south of it, and the surrounding countryside.-Formation:...
Borough Council. It is a museum with collections of Christian icons, Egyptian hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs were a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that combined logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphs for religious literature on papyrus and wood...
, and local history, as well as those of the former Lewis Textile Museum
Lewis Textile Museum
The Lewis Textile Museum was bequeathed to the people of Blackburn by a local cotton industrialist, Thomas Boys Lewis . The Lewis Textile Museum was closed in 2006 and a new gallery with its collection of looms and textile machinery was moved to Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery...
.
The building
The museum is in a Grade II listed building, on the corner of Museum Street and Richmond Terrace. It was originally opened as an art gallery and library in 1874, with the library occupying the ground floor and the art gallery on the first floor. The building was enlarged in 1893. In the 1970s, the library moved to Town Hall Street, occupying the former premises of the Co-operative Central Store, providing more space for the display of the localLocal history
Local history is the study of history in a geographically local context and it often concentrates on the local community. It incorporates cultural and social aspects of history...
and social history
Social history
Social history, often called the new social history, is a branch of History that includes history of ordinary people and their strategies of coping with life. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments...
collections which formed Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery.
Lewis Textile Museum
The museum service was also responsible for the Lewis Textile MuseumLewis Textile Museum
The Lewis Textile Museum was bequeathed to the people of Blackburn by a local cotton industrialist, Thomas Boys Lewis . The Lewis Textile Museum was closed in 2006 and a new gallery with its collection of looms and textile machinery was moved to Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery...
before it was closed. The contents of the Lewis Textile Museum have now been moved into the main museum building on Museum Street and the gallery which houses the collection of loom
Loom
A loom is a device used to weave cloth. The basic purpose of any loom is to hold the warp threads under tension to facilitate the interweaving of the weft threads...
s renamed Cottontown. The Lewis Textile Museum was bequeathed by Thomas Boys Lewis, a local cotton industrialist.
Collections
The collections at Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery are locally and internationally important and significant. The most notable includes the Japanese Print Collection which was amassed by Thomas Boys Lewis, Cotton Town the Manuscript and Numismatic Collections, both of which were bequeathed by Edward Hart and the Icon Collection Cotton Town.Exhibitions
In 2006, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery took part in the touring exhibition, C21, which was part of the FukuokaFukuoka, Fukuoka
is the capital city of Fukuoka Prefecture and is situated on the northern shore of the island of Kyushu in Japan.Voted number 14 in a 2010 poll of the World's Most Livable Cities, Fukuoka is praised for its green spaces in a metropolitan setting. It is the most populous city in Kyushu, followed by...
Asian Art Trinennale. Reviews of the exhibition were reported by agencies such as the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
.