Lancashire Archives and Local History annual report 2023-2024

About Lancashire Archives and Local History

Lancashire Archives cares for 900 years of the County’s history.

Millions of items, from medieval parchments to digital sound recordings, are stored on 9 miles of shelving in the strongrooms in Preston and in Local History Libraries around the county.

We collect and preserve archives so that Lancashire’s stories will be told in the future; and so they are available for everyone to use and enjoy today.

We are an Accredited Archive Service as designated by The National Archives and supported by an amazing team of volunteers and the Friends of Lancashire Archives.

Access and Engagement

 In 2023-2024 we:

  • Developed and delivered with Goofus Theatre a new piece of family theatre - Clomping About! - puppetry, music, dance & story, inspired by local myth, folklore, people & places of Lancashire;
  • Ran events and the UCLan Science Festival and the first UCLan Humanities Festival;
  • Launched a major partnership with the National Football Museum;
  • Supported LPDS for a special primary school project in Crawshawbooth looking at the history of Lancashire agriculture, engaging 270 pupils;
  • Hosted a successful Fun Palaces event with members of our local community enjoying the many interesting free activities on offer; and ran events for Heritage Open Days, Chinese New Year
  • Launched our new exhibition space and developed a new programme of exhibitions with Lancashire Museums, culminating in the launch of Shaping the Future: Lancashire Women's Lives, 1950-1980;
  • Featured as Highly Commended in the Alan Ball Local History awards for our Lancashire local history magazine, Archives;
  • Hosted two Project Search interns who scanned 2811 glass slides on their placements.

Collections and Conservation

In 2023-2024 we: 

  • Secured a £222,000 investment from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Friends of Lancashire Archives for the Keeping East Lancashire in the Picture project working with photographic collections in East Lancashire libraries;
  • Supported over 100 volunteers contributing over 3500 hours of their time to our collections and digitisation projects;
  • Modernised local history facilities at Chorley Library including the Windrush 75 exhibition working with Chorley Heritage Centre Group;
  • Launched the Clarets Collected project working with new collections relating to Burnley Football Club and secured external investment for a project officer post;
  • Accepted 170 new collections into the Archives and created 77,000 new public catalogue records;
  • Partnered with Community Rail Partnership and Clitheroe Royal Grammar School pupils to create a new Preston Station poster using the Lancashire Printed Collection and Red Rose collections;
  • Launched our library Local History Champions network;
  • Reduced our accessions backlog by 37% and developed our digital preservation solution, Preservica.

 Lancashire Archives and Local History in Numbers

  • 5,090,733 views of images of Lancashire documents on Ancestry
  • 900,000 unique page views on Red Rose Collections and LANCAT
  • 14,097 documents produced for users
  • 2000 people visited to use documents in the searchroom
  • 7554 written or emailed enquiries including copying orders
  • 4446 followers on Twitter
  • 4172 hours worked by our Archives volunteers
  • 5000+ attendees at our talks, events and engagement activities across 90 different events
  • 1001 students from 27 Lancashire school classes have explored aspects of their local history in bespoke sessions based on items from our collections
  • 200 Friends of Lancashire Archives supported us
  • 170 accessions of new archives were accepted and 77,000 new public catalogue descriptions created

Lancashire Archives in our Visitors’ Words

“The workshop worked out really well and we received some wonderful written feedback from the participants. The images and maps you found for us really fed into what we were doing and having the tour round the archive treasures by Zab (who is so inspiring!) was the icing on the cake.”

“Just wanted to drop a quick thank you to everyone who organised and were part of our trip this week. The children (and adults) loved it and were fascinated with everything they saw. We would love to visit again - some of our staff were very jealous we got to go in the archives and would love to come with their classes int he future.”

“Thank you for allowing me to show my American friend around the archives yesterday, and for showing him some of the treasures. He was impressed with everything he saw… This was his first trip outside of the USA, and one he will never forget. Thank you all for being a part of that.”

“Thank you so much, this is the exact information I was looking for! I'd only dared to dream that the name of the father of her son, my x2 Great-Grandfather, would be mentioned here. I'm so grateful for you and the incredible team of volunteers for uncovering this piece of our history. I'm going to forward this information to my Great-Uncle in New Zealand who turned 90 last month. He'll now see the name of his grandfather for the first time - you've made my day!”

“I just want to express to you my deepest gratitude, as I had pretty much lost hope of being successful. Your suggestion of the coroner’s archives would not have been something I would have ever considered.”

“I just wanted to thank all of you very much for your support in my research. I had a very productive day on Tuesday thanks to your collective expertise and diligence.”