Pendle Hill Museum - Image Roughlee Boating Lake, copyright © The Francis Frith Collection
Announcing Pendle Hill Museum
Please share your memories and photos from the tea gardens and inns, Roughlee Boating Lake, and other local leisure attractions up to 1980
Throughout 2025, we’ll be launching a new digital-first museum: Pendle Hill Museum, dedicated to sharing all the incredible histories of the Pendle Hill area. It has been set up as a non-profit Community Interest Company, with the goal of preserving our local history for future generations.
What exactly is a digital-first museum? Well, unlike most museums, there is no physical building to visit; rather, it lives online through digital exhibitions and through a series of pop-up exhibitions and experiences. The goal is to share our incredible local histories through the phones in our pockets; available to everyone, everywhere.
There’s already an amazing wealth of local history expertise: from the brilliant research undertaken by the Pendle Forest History Group; to the inspirational Pendle Radicals project by Mid Pennine Arts; to the insightful documentary capturing the history of the UK’s last Clarion House; to the Industrial Heritage trails around Roughlee; to the many books, documentaries and projects about the Pendle Witch Trials; to name just a few.
This museum aims to provide a front door to knowledge like this – making it easy to find reliable, interesting information about our shared local histories.
The first exhibition we’re creating is called WORK/LIFE. It is one of just a small handful of projects across the country to be funded by Historic England as part of their Everyday Heritage programme.
Pendle Hill has been a place of escape and relaxation for generations of workers. In the period 1900-1980, the area was particularly buzzing with workers from nearby towns and cities. Our tiny villages of Barley, Newchurch and Roughlee reinvented themselves as thriving leisure destinations – packed with tea gardens, inns and the popular Boating Lake at Roughlee.
All we now have to remember these are a handful of old postcards and a few photos. History like this is often seen as ‘too ordinary’ to properly capture and preserve, so sadly gets forgotten over time. It’s time to change that – they deserve to take their rightful pride of place.
With this first exhibition, we want to capture the memories, stories and photos of these local leisure destinations: Roughlee’s Boating Lake and Pleasure Grounds, Happy Valley Tea Garden, Clarion House, Noggarth Tea Garden, Thorneyholme Hall as a temperance hotel and tea garden, the Bay Horse Inn; Barley’s Pendle Inn and Old Post Office Tearoom; and Newchurch’s Lamb Inn and Friendly Inn, and many more.
To achieve this, we really need your help. Please search through your photo albums, memories and keepsakes – raid the loft if necessary! If you have anything we might be able to use, memories to share, or simply want to chat about it further, please email hello@pendlehillmuseum.org or let me know. We’ll arrange to scan any items so you can keep the originals.
We’ll be running a series of events later in the year to explore these histories further, as well as considering how our work/life balance and use of the countryside looks today compared with back then. The final exhibition will then be launched late summer.
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