Burnley museum receive £249K National Lottery funding

Gawthorpe Textiles Collection, located in Burnley’s Gawthorpe Hall, will use the £249,541 funds to improve their collection, adding new stories and perspectives. 

Gawthorpe Textiles Collection is one of the largest textile collections in the country but remains something of a hidden gem despite being known to textile specialists worldwide.

The collection contains more than 30,000 items including costume and accessories, lace, embroideries, quilts, tools and other related craft items.

Around half of the collection is international in origin with textiles from China, India, Japan, Europe, Africa and the Americas.

A Chinese dragon robe which dates to around1820 (Photo: Gawthorpe Textiles Collection).

A spokesperson for the museum said the new funds will help to improve the collection and also help it to reach new and wider audiences.

The said: “With the funds that we have received the charity is laying the foundations for moving towards re-establishing a centre of excellence for textile learning which meets the needs of the 21st century.

“We will reach out to our existing and new audiences to better understand their needs and so the first strand will be delivering public workshops, artist led community activity programmes and consultations with audiences across East Lancashire to help bring the collection to new audiences.

“We hope to introduce film, audio and other digital media to bring displays to life, telling new stories and sharing different perspectives.

“This will enhance the visitor experience to Gawthorpe Hall and celebrate textile heritage as a living and breathing source of creative inspiration.

A herb pillow, one of the oldest items in the collection (Photo: Gawthorpe Textiles Collection).

“We will be seeking to recruit local community artists and volunteers who represent our local diversity and that can bring new perspectives to the collection’s interpretation.”

They will also be reviewing and digitising their collection to protect it for future use.

They said: “Secondly, to protect the collection for the future and to facilitate increased access to it we will be carrying out an intensive process of collection review, improving cataloguing and digitisation to enable easier online as well as physical access.

“From this, other activity will flow more easily - from loans to other institutions or travelling exhibitions to direct work with the public, to formal and accredited educational programmes and academic research to support the ongoing development of collaborations with local colleges and universities.

“Also it will support the development of commercial opportunities to license designs from the collection which will help to create an income stream to support both the ongoing preservation of the items and the charitable educational work that the organisation undertakes.”    

Founder Rachel Kay-Shuttleworth, last resident of Gawthorpe Hall, was a renowned textile expert in her day and amassed the collection to use it as teaching aids to support her drive to provide opportunities for learning and skills development.

Rachel Kay-Shuttleworth teaching lace to a group of girls from Surrey in the 1960s (Photo: Gawthorpe Textiles Collection).

She established activities and support for people that were unemployed or ill, giving them access to wondrous treasures from the world.

She helped to improve their making and design skills to support them to find employment, build their self-belief and confidence and improve their overall wellbeing.

She had a vision to create a textile learning centre which she achieved at Gawthorpe Hall in the years before her death in 1967.

The museum's board of trustees have long held the ambition for the collection to be used to educate and inspire a new generations of artists as well as being more accessible to the general public.

A spokesperson for Gawthorpe Textiles Collection said: "'Cherish the past, adorn the present, create for the future' was a maxim that Rachel developed from the teachings of architect and designer William R Lethaby.

"The ethos of using heritage to create for the future is something that we still hold dear at GTC, using our fabulous collection as a means of creating opportunities to learn and to inspire creativity. 

"Our vision remains to  develop a centre of excellence for textile learning based around the collection and this project will be a significant step in building towards that.

"We look forward to the next exciting chapter for the collection."