Museum of Science and Industry have been giving their Textiles Gallery a face-lift ahead of their relaunch on 21st July, resulting in more objects on display, and better hands-on activities than ever before!

The gallery will paint a vivid picture of how cotton transformed Manchester into a city like nothing the world had ever seen before, populated by ingenious makers and determined profit seekers, spinning and weaving cloth to sell around the globe. In this sprawling, swarming, rain-soaked city of extreme wealth and poverty, the cotton industry reshaped the lives of Manchester people, creating a new kind of urban community.

The pictures below show their team at work preparing some of the new objects to go on display, but much-loved objects from the gallery’s current form, such as Richard Arkwright’s incredible Water Frame that revolutionised cotton production, will also be redisplayed in a way that will increase visitors’ enjoyment. The ever-popular Explainer shows among the working mill machinery have been updated to give an even deeper and more exciting insight into the birth of the industrial revolution.

As well as new interactive displays, the gallery will include a conversation space where visitors will be able to try hands-on activities, get up close with unusual objects and have their say in upcoming projects in the gallery.

Here, three of those involved in the gallery's face-lift shares with us their involvement in the project:

Kathryn Kreczak – Conservator

"Here I’m checking the condition of the object – looking at it closely and commenting on its surface condition, stability and thinking about its suitability for long term display. This gets written into a notebook and then added to a condition record on the collections database. It’s an important part of my job that is generally hidden behind the scenes.

I’m working on a George III half-penny coin, dated 1799, from the fourth floor of Decker Mill at Murrays' Mill in Ancoats, found during the archaeological survey of the site. The coin is likely to have been deliberately concealed during the original construction of the mill building in 1801 to bring luck or prosperity, following a long-standing folklore tradition.

It is important to have a record of the condition of the object firstly to check its suitability for display and secondly so that its condition can be monitored – we’re generally thinking about the long-term preservation of the object. Then it’s also important to ensure the object is cleaned so that it is chemically stable, for instance by removing the active corrosion on the coin, so that the object’s condition does not deteriorate. In the case of the coin, cleaning also removed the dirt so that the image and text on the coin is visible for display.

The coin was corroding so its condition would continue to deteriorate. The image and text on the coin was still visible after cleaning but if it was not stabilised then this would eventually be lost forever.

It takes approximately two hours to do this work, although this time can change massively depending on the size and condition of the object."

Ceri Forster - Archivist

"I’ve been working with a large collection of shipper’s tickets, both loose and pasted into albums. The shipper’s tickets were attached to bolts of cloth or yarn to help the manufacturers make their products instantly recognisable to their customers. They were deliberately designed to be brightly coloured to stand out, and featured motifs that the textile merchants thought would appeal to the fabric’s destined marketplaces.

The collection contains hundreds of different examples. It was necessary to narrow down the selection to make sure that we were getting a good range for the exhibition, and because those that we selected needed to be photographed in order for us to make facsimiles for display.

It took about an hour to make a ‘longlist’, although I didn’t have to do it by myself! After that, they were photographed (which I think took about a day or so) and the team then selected the final list from the digitised images.

By selecting the tickets in this way it enabled us to put a lot more of them on display. If we hadn’t selected them and then made digital copies, we would have had to put the whole album on display. This would have meant that a) the album was put at risk because of the environment b) visitors would only have been able to see one page of the album and c) the book would no longer be accessible to researchers.  

We chose to create a display of the shipper’s tickets because they demonstrate the huge range of different places that Manchester cloth went to, the number of different companies that were involved and the work that went into ‘marketing’ their wares. They demonstrate a ‘sub-industry’ of researchers, artists and printers working on these tickets alone, and show that marketing and branding teams are not a new invention! They also make a very vibrant and colourful display which conveys the energy and vitality of the textiles industry at its peak."

Katie Belshaw – Curator

"I’m looking at a pair of tiny, child sized clogs dating from around 1870, from the museum’s collection.

Practical and hardwearing, clogs were the work-a-day shoe of industrial Manchester’s women, children and men. What is unusual about this pair is that the children who were them never owned them. They were lent by Charter Street Ragged School in Angel Meadow to children whose families could not afford to buy shoes.  They are stamped ‘CSRS loaned, not to be pawned’, to stop poor children or their families pawning them for money.

The clogs were selected for the gallery to show the precarious lives of industrial Manchester’s workforce. Workers could earn good wages in Manchester’s textile mills, but work was never guaranteed. Cotton shortages or low demand for cloth could shut the mills.  Workers then had to go without wages. Many struggled to afford food, clothes and a place to live. So called ‘ragged’ schools like Charter Street in Angel Meadow, by the middle of the 19th century one of Manchester’s worst slum districts, provided food, clothing and basic education to Manchester’s poorest people."

Museum and Industry's Textiles Gallery relaunches on 21st July. For more information, head to their site.