This catalogue is funded by UK Government, Historic England, Arts Council England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund, with support from Westmorland and Furness Council.
Thanks to BarrowFull, Cumbria Archives, Full of Noises, Signal Film & Media, Theatre Factory and The Dock Museum for their contributions.
Special thanks to Helen Houston, Rory Wood, Mike Quinn, Susan Benson, the shop owners and the people of Barrow, without whom this project would not have been possible.
Designed by work-form
Printed and bound by Gomer Press
ISBN 978-1-3999-7743-2
Aerial view of Duke Street Film still from ‘Re:discover Barrow – an Armchair Walk’ Credit: Colin Aldred.
This catalogue documents the wonderful artworks produced through the ‘Re:discover Barrow – Lost Shops’ cultural programme (2019 – 2024), a collaboration between local residents, artists and arts organisations.
Inspired by conversations with locals about Duke Street and Cornwallis Street, the works – spanning film, sound, visual arts and performance mediums – capture the histories and memories of these streets, expressing their significance to the people of Barrow.
Thank you to everyone who helped make the project a success!
The area occupied by Duke Street and Cornwallis Street in the heart of Barrow-in-Furness was one of 60 High Street Heritage Action Zones designated by Historic England across the country. In 2019, Barrow Borough Council (since April 2023, Westmorland and Furness Council) was awarded £ 1.1m of government funding, delivered through Historic England, for the Re:discover Barrow project, designed to start the rejuvenation of the heritage, retail and cultural offer of the town. This capital funding was to “unlock the potential of high streets fuelling economic, social and cultural recovery, encouraging people to say ‘Hi!’ to the high street, and breathe new life into it for future generations”.
A related cultural programme was designed to make high streets more vibrant, drawing on the creative skills of artists to engage local people and restore pride in town centres. Barrow’s cultural consortium was led by Art Gene, working alongside fellow arts organisations Full of Noises, Signal Film and Media and Theatre Factory. Over four years, including the Covid period, they delivered ‘Re:discover Barrow – Lost Shops’, each working with the community to produce an artistic response to Duke Street and the people who worked there. Each of these art works is featured in the following pages, alongside interviews with some of the artists.
The cultural programme was extended with a Know Your Neighbourhood grant in 2023, also distributed by the UK Government through Historic England. This supported new work with young people and residents of care homes, also allowing Art Gene to produce a Lost Shops exhibition in February 2024 called ‘Place – Re:discover Barrow’, a social history event and this catalogue.
Image copyright Barrow Borough Council (now Westmorland and Furness Council). Reproduced from the 1995 Ordnance Survey mapping with the permission of the Controller of His Majesty’s Stationery Office Crown Copyright.
‘Re:discover Barrow – An Armchair Walk’ was the first in our series of cultural events, exploring and celebrating the rich history of Duke Street. For this initial project, Art Gene worked with the Council, artists and volunteers to bring together fascinating new research about this important historical area.
Drawing on Barrow Archives and local people’s memories, we told the story of the businesses that traded on Duke Street, and the people who lived and worked there over a period of 150 years or more. Michael Quinn conducted a huge amount of research in collaboration with Susan Benson at Barrow Archives, to source historical data about the individual premises. Contributions were also made by local historian Bill Myers, and many residents and business owners who responded to our call for information and memories about the street.
Colin Aldred, from Aerial Artwork, was commissioned to film and edit the production, combining drone footage of the present-day street, with archive imagery, audio soundbites and video interviews. Narration by former Barrow Mayor and raconteur, John Murphy, and Walney poet, Kate Davis, set the piece with local voices.
Colin reflected on making An Armchair Walk:
“This film stands apart from the others in my portfolio for many different reasons. It is by far the longest, at 28 minutes, and with the most edits. It was also a huge collaborative effort, with many contributors. It was important to do justice to the extensive research into Duke Street by volunteers and the detailed recollections that many Barrovians contributed so generously.
A lot of the work was done during Covid lockdown which created additional hurdles. The film includes interviews and a voice over, which I haven’t had in earlier films, so the audio editing was a completely new challenge for me. The slow-moving drone footage and the video captured walking with a camera on top of a 3-metre pole was intended to provide both the backdrop for the stories and to show the well-known architecture from a new angle. The merging from past- to present-day photographs is one of my favourite bits of the film.”
The Art Gene film was premiered over Zoom on Wednesday 7th July 2021 to an audience of over 100. The ‘armchair walk’ format was conceived by Art Gene’s Maddi Nicholson. Maddi had been leading armchair walks online throughout lockdown, as regulations then did not allow an in-person group walk. As of December 2023, the film has been viewed 13k times on YouTube.
Aerial view of Duke Street, before HSHAZ street enhancements
Film still from ‘Re:discover Barrow – an Armchair Walk’
The research of volunteer, Mike Quinn, was used extensively to inform the ‘Re:discover Barrow – an Armchair Walk’ film, reproduced in Art Gene’s exhibition, ‘Place – Re:discover Barrow’. His efforts also formed the foundation for the work undertaken by the artists involved in Lost Shops.
Here we feature four shops, providing a sample of the research and the memories evoked.
“In early December 2020 I was delighted to be given the opportunity to research the histories of Duke Street properties on behalf of Art Gene as part of the High Street Heritage Action Zone project.
I expected to be making frequent visits to Barrow Archives and Local Studies Centre, however due to Covid and the subsequent national lockdown imposed in January 2021, this was not possible. Thankfully Barrow Archivist, Susan Benson, remained at work and was able to copy and email me any documents, photos etc I required, which proved invaluable. Meanwhile I spent hours at home online trawling through old newspapers and census records searching for anything of interest relating to past occupiers of these properties. It was a painstaking process but worth it in the end, as coupled with the information provided by Susan and contributions from local people, we now have a fascinating account of the history of these properties and an insight into the lives of the occupiers over the years.”
Mike Quinn Barrow resident and community historian.
Art Gene
“The House of Middleton is one of the finest appointed hairdressing establishments in the county… The impression conveyed on entering their premises is one of quiet luxury and refinement, and yet, with all that, a smooth efficiency pervades everywhere. All hair styles are created to suit the individual, and every client is under the personal supervision of Mr. Middleton himself.”
Middleton’s Court
Hairdressers advert, early 1920s
Middleton’s staff outing, date unknown, taken before 1960. Photo courtesy of Tammy Bond (granddaughter of Elizabeth (Betty) Middleton) and Neil Bond.
Arthur & Winifred Middleton Middleton Court Hairdressers They expanded into No. 84 Duke Street to create ‘The House of Middleton Court’ 1960s
Daughter Betty Bond takes over until retirement in 1977
2008 Paul Rose, High Flyer’s café opens with an aviation theme
2018 Dave Turner, TNT Records
2019 Awarded UK Record Shop of the year
It’s been said that up to 80 hairdressers worked from the premises of Middleton’s Court Hairdressers. Many residents reminisced about this institution, of getting their hair done and of the glamorous hair styles, cosmetics and beauty that helped shape Barrow from the roaring ‘20s onwards right up to 1977. Following a period when number 86 was a café, in 2018, Dave Turner established TNT Records, a “proper record shop”, which still exists today.
Sarah Hardacre, ‘Practice Makes Perfect’ Mixed Media Collage, 2023.
1871 John Morris, Pawn Broker 1876 William Roberts, Pawn Broker & later his son Thomas 1920s
Miss Margaret Cowan was one of the first female stockbrokers in the United Kingdom. Her business partner was Robert Twentyman and after his death in 1964, she took over the business. A Soroptimist member (a volunteer movement advocating for the rights of women and girls), Margaret is fondly remembered by her niece, Gill Jepson, for her path-breaking career as well as a member of the family:
“Her business name was Margaret Ann Cowan – she was only Peggy to friends. Everyone knew her as Miss Cowan. She was quite a formidable lady, but the most incredibly kind person you could ever meet. She qualified sometime in the 1960s, she was something like the sixth lady stockbroker [in the UK] and she was a fully paid-up member of the Stock Exchange. She deserves to be remembered because she worked jolly hard all her life to become something pretty remarkable, particularly for that time. She was a clever lady. She definitely was a clever lady.”
1875 Western District Bank
1880 Thomas Waltham, Hairdresser
1890 Emile Luscher, Hairdresser
1892 James Copland, Hairdresser & Perfumer Toilet club for hot baths & grooming services
1952 Robert Twentyman, Stockbroker
1964 Margaret Cowan, Twentyman’s business partner takes over, one of the first female stockbrokers in the UK.
1998 The Burlesque Club
The Furness Toilet Club on Duke Street, number 115, taken between 1890 – 1930. From 1890, James Copland ran a hairdresser and perfumier from the premises for 40 years.
Photo: Jennifer Foote.
1881 Richard Marsden, Tailor
1890 Malcolm Stewart, Tailor and Draper
1907 George Kay, Ladies’ & Men’s Tailor
1912 Wilkinson’s Auction Rooms
1916 Salvation Army, War Workers’ Hostel
1934 E. Whiteside, Poster Artist H. O’Hare Hairdresser & Tobacconist
1936 Victoria restaurant
1939 Pickavance & Heron Solicitors Then Pickavance & Forrester
1970 Forresters Solicitors
During the First World War, the Salvation Army repurposed number 117 into a War Workers’ Hostel for 230 men, to accommodate the influx of munitions workers to Barrow.
After the war, the hostel continued its operations alongside various businesses. By 1939, the building had transformed into the offices of Pickavance and Heron, a solicitor’s practice, evolving into Pickavance and Forrester briefly and ultimately becoming Forresters Solicitors, which still operates from the same site today.
Copyright the Sankey Family Photography Collection, Courtesy of Cumbria Archives.
1904 Barrow’s 1st department store opens
1962 Pass & Co closes
1980 Lotus Chinese restaurant & Dandy’s bed store share the building
1990 Dandy’s takes over the whole building
1999 Yate’s Wine Lodge opens
2014 Deemed structurally unsafe & demolished
Trading for nearly 60 years, Pass & Co was known for selling everything “from a pin to a piano”, featuring Walch and Pohl’s musical instruments and a record department where customers could listen to the chart-topping records in booths before buying.
Local resident Jacqueline Bailey referred to the store’s ground floor as an “Aladdin’s cave of childhood delights”.
Post-Covid, the Re:discover Barrow cultural programme was launched in October 2021 with Memory Stalls in three locations –Barrow Library, The Forum and Barrow Market. These day-long drop-in events, involving all partners, invited the public into conversation and encouraged them to share memories and experiences associated with Duke Street and Cornwallis Street.
The memories and artefacts shared during the Memory Stalls became a rich repository of local stories and functioned as research material for the cultural consortia and individual artists. All of the collected stories are available for reference at Barrow Archives Centre.
Lost Shops Memory Stall in the Forum Foyer, 2021 (stall made by artist, Maddi Nicholson). Photo: Maddi Nicholson, Art Gene.
Rachel Ashton of Theatre Factory interviewing a stall holder in Barrow Market, 2021. Photo: Maddi Nicholson, Art Gene.
Signal Film and Media
For this film project, Kerry Kolbe and Karen Bird, BAFTA-nominated screenwriter-filmmakers, delved into oral histories and archive research in Barrow. They wanted to create a film that reflected local memories and could be set predominantly on Duke Street.
An image of a real-life teenage lab assistant in the town’s Sankey Photography Shop on Duke Street inspired the emotive story of a woman’s struggle to pursue her talent for photography in the face of life’s challenges over more than 50 years, from the 1960s to the present day. The idea was developed further at an afternoon tea with 16 older local women who gave feedback and shared their personal stories to help shape the scriptwriting.
‘Wishbone’ was shot over Autumn / Winter 2022 with local actors and a crew of 38 young film trainees, extras and volunteers helping to re-create life on Duke Street. Signal Film and Media built sets depicting the interior of the Sankey Photography Shop, the Palace Cinema and a 1960s living room, and strategically filmed at sites along Duke Street that could still convincingly appear to be from years gone by, including St Mary’s Church, Barrow Library, Jeffersons Hotel, the Town Hall and the Forum.
The production became a mini-epic as the period settings required the team to hunt for lots of props – from old pound notes to wooden crutches, cameras and banking paraphernalia, lots of which were thankfully tracked down inexpensively on eBay; a Facebook appeal led to the loan of an authentic Silver Cross Pram from a member of the public and Kerry Kolbe, Signal’s scriptwriter, even loaned her baby to ride along inside it!
The film was screened to a large audience at the Forum in December 2022 and in 2023 further work was done on the score. During Winter 2023, a series of workshops with 30 young volunteers led to them learning how to market and distribute the film to reach the widest audience possible.
‘Wishbone’ – Film stills Credit: Signal film and Media.
Full of Noises
‘From A Pin to A Piano – A People’s Museum of Barrow’ took place at 105 Duke Street and opened from 27 March – 2 April, 2023. Again inspired by Barrovians’ memories, the multimedia installation delved into the buildings once in the Heritage Action Zone area, such as the old museum, Pass & Co’s department store and the Public Hall. In the week that it was open, 2000 individuals stepped into 105 Duke Street.
The project was created through a partnership with Andrew and Susan Deakin of Barrow sound art organisation, Full of Noises, Artfly (Chris and Jennie Dennett), artist John Hall, and Barrow’s Dock Museum, all of whom received invaluable support from Susan Benson and the staff at the Barrow Archives.
The installation quickly evolved into a cherished space, a meeting point for shared laughter, reminiscence, and forging of new memories. It became a space to hold things that mattered to the people of Barrow, a space to tell their individual stories.
As the following interviews reveal, ‘From A Pin to A Piano’ was a social space that embodied the spirit of Barrow and its people in a way that perhaps words can only partially capture.
Interior view of ‘A Pin to a Piano, A People’s Museum of Barrow’ 2023 – Full of Noises. Photo: Artfly.
The queue outside ‘From A Pin to a Piano, A People’s Museum of Barrow’ at 105 Duke Street. Photo: Artfly.
Andrew
& Susan Deakin
AG The first person I interviewed was a woman called Margaret, […] she told me many stories, but there were three that leapt out because they happened in buildings, two of which don’t exist now and one of which isn’t used for what she remembers it for.
The first one was the museum and art gallery, above the current Barrow Library. Margaret remembers going there and seeing various things to do with Barrow and its history. She got quite upset that those things weren’t on show anymore. In fact, she seemed convinced that all those things had been thrown away. I said, wouldn’t it be nice, because I’m sure they exist […] if we could get some of those things out of the [Dock] Museum [stores] and show them again, maybe in an empty shop on Duke Street?
The second story that grabbed my attention was of the department store, Pass & Co [54-56 Duke Street]. Margaret told us this story about seeing what she called a doll, but was in fact, it turns out, a child sized mannequin. She pestered her mum to buy it, her birthday came at Christmas, and she unwrapped her presents and there was this doll, and she gave it a name, Queenie. I asked, what’s happened to Queenie? It’s upstairs in a plastic bag in the loft. So again, I said, well, wouldn’t it be nice to get Queenie out and show her off and see what story she’s got to tell? That was the second seed.
The third story was when Margaret was working […] On a Friday night she and her friends used to finish work,
go to the market, buy some fabric and then go to each other’s houses and make a dress to wear to the Public Hall on a Saturday. These three stories, and Margaret getting quite upset, all just sat around in my head.
SD We started to think about how we could bring these things together […] into an interactive art exhibition and installation, that dealt with the people of Barrow and their memories and stories.
SD A lot of people had said that it [the Dock Museum] didn’t feel like their museum, that it was a shipyard museum, for the shipyard. The dresses for example. People weren’t made to think they were worth keeping. But again, they were important to them and would bring back memories.
AD Quite a few underlying questions emerged around value, monetary value, individual, and personal value, what we value as a culture, as a town, and truth and storytelling and whose story we tell: all those things were bubbling under almost everything that was in that space.
AG You’ve mentioned how difficult it is to describe the essence of the project.
AD Yes, it’s quite difficult to pin down what it was. By the time we started getting hundreds through in a day, there were times when it just felt euphoric, this feeling of generosity. People had not seen each other for years, and connections were being made and conversations being had, and laughter, and maybe not having enough time to eat your dinner because there was no time.
I remember saying to John, I just want to do this for the rest of my life. And I still sort of mean that.
In art terms, it was an installation, it was an installation by five artists. And it was this other thing that’s nothing to do with art at all. But art was the mechanism, the vehicle that allowed these other things to happen and happen in a mind-blowingly, stupendous way.
SD People were willing to queue for things and people don’t like queuing, do they?
Artfly
Artfly is a collective made up of artists Jennie and Chris Dennett. Together they make playful, interactive community art and digital exhibits. Here they share insights into the project and the creation of the infamous Mummy’s hand that featured in the People’s Museum and ‘Place – Re:discover Barrow’ exhibition.
JD Loads of people who visited the old museum remembered the mummy’s hand but there’s no sign of it. There’s a record of it [the hand] but it’s nowhere to be seen.
CD I think there’s a horror film waiting to happen. It could be roaming. We decided to do something with the stories of the mummy’s hand. We recreated it as a holographic image of this mummy’s hand turning, which is actually our daughter Dot. […] We wrapped her hand in bandages dipped in tea, put her on an office chair, then we had to rotate slowly.
It took a long time, but it worked really well!
AG Were there any other items that stood out to you?
JD People have fond memories of the moose’s head [that hung in the old Barrow Museum]. So that was our star piece, getting the moose back on show. But it turned out, in talking to people about the moose, that there was a second one!
I went to Hart Jackson – the man who shot [the museum] moose was part of the Hart Jackson legal firm in Ulverston. He’d come back with several specimens, and I went to find the other ones. There is indeed a massive head in the attic at Hart Jackson amongst all the dusty legal journals. We tried really hard to put them both on display together, but I couldn’t find any insurer to do it, which is a shame. We reunited them digitally instead.
AG How did you do that?
JD We had a live feed of the other moose which looked like security camera footage of the other, but lots of visitors started to say that’s not a moose, it’s a caribou!
JD It turned out not to be a moose at all. But that was quite fun because it’s a good talking point. […]
It led to other untold stories – all of the taxidermy [on display, from the Barrow Museum] was done by a firm in Carnforth, which was one of the leaders in the craft. A woman was really excited about this.
JD Passes [the Pass & Co. department store] had cutting edge technology, with its gramophones and tellies, so Andrew had been really keen to make sure the pop up museum had that wealth of stuff, such as gramophones, dictaphones, tapes.
CD One of the things we quite like to do is to bring back more dials and switches and physical controls. We had the typewriter there – most of the kids didn’t know what a typewriter was. The older women were trying their typing speeds out, to see if they had still got it, which they did!
Wowing the grand kids. And the kids couldn’t get over how hard you had to bash the typewriter! It was quite lovely to say ‘bash it harder!’ I mean, what child doesn’t want to hear that instruction?
JD So much came out of the People’s Museum because it was so popular. We spent a week talking to hundreds of people every day.
John Hall
John produces video, music, performances, drawings, magazines, books, and records influenced by locality, history and communal memory. He exhibits regularly in the UK and EU through performances and broadcast arts festivals. In this project, John made a short film exploring Barrow Public Hall from the perspective of its weekly dancers.
JH A lot of the work I do is to do with community and this idea of communal memory. Shared experiences, shared landscapes, what people do in those
spaces they hack out for each other and for themselves. When I was a resident of Alfred Barrow, we went along to document the demolition of the old Public Hall, the big dance hall at the back of the Town Hall. Everybody passed through at some point, generations of people meeting there, dancing and copping off […] I went there once myself when it were a kind of rock venue. It used to get bands like The Who playing there throughout the 60s.
[…] I’d been doing this project as part of BarrowFull called ‘Into the Music’. I’d spoken to a load of people in the area about their relationship with recorded music, I spoke to DJs and promoters and fans, and I built this oral history archive […] I thought there might be a way of using this format for this project. There’s a lady that I knew from various committees, Pat Jones, and somebody had remembered that Pat had always gone to the Public Hall. I talked to her and she said, “Oh, yeah, I met my husband there – he was 6ft four and I’m 5ft one!” And I thought, well, that’s a good story straight away!
I recorded her. She’s very funny. Wicked sense of humour. I didn’t use her voice because I wanted [the film] to be silent, but the recordings are now in the archives in Barrow. She tells her story about her courtship with her husband and uses the Public Hall as the background for it and their social life [...] and I did a little animation to go with it.
AG Tell me about your process.
JH There’s a ballroom dancing school in town run by Margaret Hetherington, and she and her daughter Amanda came along. We took over a room at
Full of Noises for the afternoon and I followed them around while they danced. I got stills of them moving step by step and I used them for the animation. Their dancing runs the whole way through the film. It’s to do with Pat Jones’ experience, really. She gave me the story. I surrounded what she had to say with bits of found footage and clippings out of the paper. It’s a little seven-minute-long silent movie.
AG Can you describe that week, you were there throughout, weren’t you?
JH Yeah. You never once stopped talking because everybody had so much to say about it. Everybody had an anecdote about the museum collection, something that they remembered. It was usually the moose.
The original museum used to get used as an interesting hangout after school. Kids would reach down and pat it [the moose] on the head, like a pet, almost. There seems to have been a kind of eccentricity to the collection, curious accumulations, very higgeldy piggledy, I think people felt they had possession of it. I think they felt it was theirs, as they should, and one of the things that kept coming up was that people, particularly older people, were genuinely concerned that this stuff had been lost. And people have lost enough, our lives have become precarious enough, they didn’t want the stuff of memory to have disappeared.
JH It’s had a really big impact on us all. I think the thing I was reminded of is how Barrow people like to talk about what you’re doing, and about the thinking behind it, and how –
and this is probably true of everywhere – people appreciate seeing their experiences reflected in what you do.
AG Andrew talked about the risks that were attached to that space and that the success of the project was very much due to being able to take those risks?
JH The atmosphere was part of it. […] Musty smells. Lots of shadows. There was a lovely clutter to it, but when you really looked, you could see it was themed and it was ordered, so it kind of rewarded attention.
AG It raises questions around the future of the museum and what that looks like today.
JH And the future of the high streets. What we’re going to do with all this bloody space.
John Hall, Sketches from a Fox-Trot. Modelled by Margaret and Amanda Hetherington from the Margaret Hetherington School of Dancing, Barrow-in-Furness, 2023.
Theatre Factory
‘Follow the Money’, a play and musical performance, was performed on Duke Street to a packed house at the Kill One Club on 31 March 2023.
Enid Milligan, former Barclays Bank employee and volunteer writer of ‘Follow the Money’ comments:
“I started writing by first talking – to friends, colleagues, family, people who worked in the other local banks. Conversations would start with “remember when” and race through people, places, characters, smells, fashions, emotions, ambitions, frustrations. Conversations led to long forgotten stories being brought back to life, important events for the town such as the ‘Vickers’ [VSEL Shipyard] strike, but also our day-to-day life working in a bank, the laughs, the personalities, the changing times, how life has moved on.
We met with Rachel and Karen from Theatre Factory regularly. Working together, we formed a timeline, deciding what to include, we then focused on a story and worked on it ready for the next meeting. I would start to write, mostly in rhyme, which helped to focus my thoughts. When writing conversations, I could hear the voices, the way people spoke, depending on their position in the bank, the rhythm of conversation between work colleagues, the era.
The ‘Vickers’ strike in the 1980s was such a pivotal time in the life of the town, I knew that it had to be included, it affected everyone in the town. The performance of the play, when I watched this period being re-enacted, brought back many emotional memories. I tried to refer to familiar buildings on Duke Street and in the town
centre to give the story a real connection to the local community and to bring back collective memories of Barrow. Once the stories were written, we worked with Rachel and Karen to complete it.
We read through the script and were then apprehensive as to how it would all be brought together on stage. We needn’t have worried, the actors brought the characters to life; we were amazed at the imaginative way the small cast of actors, with limited resources, could tell so many stories. The audience loved the performance, and we loved the whole experience!
I started writing ‘Blowing Up Duke Street’ (see p. 6) as a bit of a joke – I remember on so many occasions having to battle against the wind to get to work. But as the lyrics developed, it seemed to become more than a song about weather and more about a period of social change sweeping through the town”.
‘Follow The Money’ – Kill One Club, Duke Street, Theatre Factory community performers, 2023. Photo: George Floyd.
The Confederation of Shipbuilding Engineering Unions’ Banner from the VSEL Shipyard Strike, 1988 in ‘Place – Re:discover
9 February – 19 April,
‘Follow The Money’ – Kill One Club, Duke Street, Theatre Factory community performers watching historic footage of the 1980s Barrow shipyard strike as part of the performance, 2023.
Photo: George Floyd.
Barrow’ exhibition, Art Gene,
2024. Courtesy of the General Trade Union in Ulverston and the Dock Museum in Barrow. Maker unknown. Photo: Maddi Nicholson, Art Gene.
Art Gene – Matthew Culley
During the lockdown in 2021, Matthew Culley, a young Barrow resident, dedicated his time to illustrating the various shops along Duke Street. Inspired by the announcement of the High Street Heritage Action Zone programme, Matthew wanted to visually preserve and celebrate the diverse architectural styles that define Duke Street through his artwork. Here we feature some of Matthew’s drawings, all of which were showcased in the exhibition held in February 2024.
Above: ‘Duke Street shops 111 – 123’, pencil on paper, hand drawn, 2023.
Right: ‘Duke Street shops 64 – 70’, pencil on paper, hand drawn, 2022.
Art Gene – Sarah Hardacre
The final year of the ‘Re:discover Barrow – Lost Shops’ programme focused on the visual arts and featured a contemporary outdoor commission led by Lost Shops resident artist, Sarah Hardacre, and a newly created artwork as a board game, ‘Duke Street – a game of community and chance’, by Art Gene’s Maddi Nicholson.
Sarah, who specialises in collage, responded to a national open call and won the commission, partly supported by BarrowFull, based on her bold and ambitious portfolio. Through interviews, workshops with Women’s Community Matters and Age Concern, and a ‘memory stall’ at Barrow Market, Sarah gathered photographs and personal accounts from people who worked or shopped on Duke Street. The result was a stunning lightbox installation in the windows of Duke Street shops and in Barrow Market, which ran from 8 December 2023 to 8 January 2024. Opened by the Mayor of Barrow, the installation featured archival images and Sarah’s photographic collages, vividly bringing to life the history of the individual shops. A temporary billboard featuring one of Sarah’s own collage works highlighted the legacy of the former Middleton’s Court Hairdressers at 86 Duke Street.
SH I was immediately struck by the people and how people knew each other and how everybody was so connected to the town and so passionate about wanting to talk about the town.
Even if people didn’t actually know each other, they shared this commonality, there’s definitely this common ground. It’s about Barrow. Completely human. It’s a human story. And it’s the stories of the people that enliven the town.
Somebody once described me as an archivist, even though I’m not officially an archivist. Within my practice and within my work, I’m always archiving materials, archiving histories. Maybe you could call me a visual archivist. I love archives and the space of them. When I found Sue Benson (at the Barrow Archives), from the second I met her, I thought, ‘wow, what a woman’. Sue is that pivotal point, being able to connect everything together. There’s so much information in that one person and she’s so passionate. She immediately welcomed me into the archive, and she made the archive human, she humanised the archive.
Mike Quinn has also been fundamental to the whole of this. The research that he did has been the basis of everything, he did all the leg work. He handed those stories to me on a plate. I was then able to take those stories and make those stories jump off the page with the connections that I made with people. When I was doing the workshops, I was able to find people who’d lived the research. There were people at Women’s Community Matters and at Barrow Market who’d done apprenticeships at Middleton’s Hairdressers, for example.
AG Your work references Middleton’s Hairdressers, did that pop up a lot within your research?
SH Yeah, it was obviously a big deal back in the day for the town. Hair is so important, being able to go and get your hair done. I think one of the reasons I picked up on it so strongly was that there are two hairdressers in almost similar locations on opposite sides of Duke Street today [The Priory and Boss Hair & Beauty Studio]. Even though Middleton’s is no longer there, that legacy feels as if it’s still there.
Sarah Hardacre, Artist (right) at Barrow Market reviewing photo archives of the lost shops with residents, 2023.
Photo: Rachael Barker, Art Gene.
Above: Clinton Rimmer (left) and Maddi Nicholson (right) of Art Gene, pasting up Sarah Hardacre’s temporary billboard on the side of number 84 Duke Street. Right: Installation view of Sarah Hardacre’s temporary billboard pasted onto the side of 84 Duke Street, New Taste. Photos: Miranda Hill, Art Gene.
Sarah Hardacre, ‘Jeane’s Fish Shop’, Mixed Media Collage, 2023.
Installation view of Sarah Hardacre’s temporary lightbox exhibition in the Town Hall Square, Barrow.
Photo: Maddi Nicholson, Art Gene.
In the final year of the project, Art Gene secured additional funding to extend the community engagement work linked to Lost Shops. With the help of Know Your Neighbourhood funding, focused on connecting people together to tackle isolation, Art Gene organised Lost Shops events within care and residential homes in Barrow and commissioned Signal Film and Media to run new workshops for young people. These sessions focused on the films made as part of Re:discover Barrow, ‘Lost Shops – an Armchair Walk’ and ‘Wishbone’ – and brought them to a new audience.
Maddi Nicholson, Art Gene’s Artist-founder and Director designed a new artwork and board game titled, ‘Duke Street – a game of community and chance’, which was played within the homes with the assistance of the residents.
“I started thinking about the street and realising how precarious life is running a shop, with COVID, the cost-of-living crisis, the internet and many, many things before that. The success of owning a shop is like a game of chance, it’s sometimes quite arbitrary whether you succeed or not. The idea of a Duke Street version of a monopoly game became a way to dial down on this place, on the questions of chance and community, and reflect on change through the histories of the shops.”
“Rather than gaining wealth it’s about gaining community credits, and doing good things in the community… The more good things you do, the more shops you can acquire […] and then big gold sheds. We all know about big sheds in Barrow!”
‘Duke Street – a game of community and chance’ by Maddi Nicholson of Art Gene. Photo: Maddi Nicholson, Art Gene.
Art Gene – Maddi Nicholson
Art Gene’s exhibition ‘Place – Re:discover Barrow’ in February to April 2024 marked the culmination of the Re:discover Barrow programme, bringing together works from the programme into a gallery space.
Through the lens of art, the exhibition provided an opportunity to reflect on the processes of mapping and narrating the story of Barrow’s streets, the histories, memories and the collective experiences of individuals who have lived and worked in Barrow. It asked, who maps the history of a place? Who tells and validates the history and stories of a place? What is your place within those stories?
About the Archive Images
The images from the Sankey Family Photography Collection displayed in this book were digitised as part of the Signal Film and Media project, ‘Seeing the North with Sankey’. The project was led by Signal Film and Media between 2018 and 2023, in collaboration with Cumbria Archives which holds the full Sankey Photographic Collection.
You can access the entire collection online: www.sankeyphotoarchive.uk.
If you would like to find out more about the ‘Seeing the North with Sankey’ project you can contact info@signalfilmandmedia.co.uk
