Stories of Lancashire often revolve around food, from delights like black pudding and tripe to everyday staples like Lancashire oatcakes. However, one dish stands out as more iconic than any other, good old fish and chips.

Although Lancashire is unlikely to have been the first place in the country to combine the two, the concept of the fish and chip shop, standing on many a street corner selling hot food for working people, is evocative of every Lancashire town. With fast growing urban populations, access to the fisheries of the Fylde coast, and rich arable farmlands, it makes perfect sense.

This range is from a fish and chip shop in Rochdale which raises an intriguing question. The great singer and actress Grace Stansfield, better known to millions as Dame Gracie Fields, Rochdale's most famous daughter, was born over a fish and chip shop owned by her grandmother Sarah Bamford on Molesworth Street, Rochdale in 1898. Did it come from that very shop? Or more likely is it a frying range very like the one used by her and her family? After all it didn't travel far, it was manufactured around 1900 by J E Nuttall & Co. in their Newgate works in Rochdale. In the collection there are other fittings from the shop, such as wooden benches, tables, a serving counter, and a potato bucket, all kept as they were when it closed in the early 1970s.