{"id":5346,"date":"2021-04-15T16:29:01","date_gmt":"2021-04-15T15:29:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fass\/projects\/cmda\/?page_id=5346"},"modified":"2023-02-01T09:59:27","modified_gmt":"2023-02-01T08:59:27","slug":"bolton","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fass\/projects\/cmda\/index.php\/ccintb-places\/bolton\/","title":{"rendered":"Bolton"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Capitol, Bolton (uploaded by terry) Creative Commons (Attribution) Licence, via cinematreasures.org<\/p><\/div>\n

Greater Manchester in the North West of England was an important centre of the textile industry up till the 1970s, and during the 1930s was home to many cinemas, old and new. CCINTB fieldwork in the Greater Manchester<\/a> conurbation took in the cotton textile manufacturing town of Bolton, Lancashire, which boasted more than twenty cinemas in the interwar years and was the location of Mass Observation\u2019s 1930s \u2018Worktown\u2019<\/a>\u00a0studies.<\/p>\n

During the 1930s and 1940s, Mass Observation–an initiative dedicated to observing and understanding ‘ordinary’ people’s daily lives–instigated a series of ethnographic studies across Britain, with data gathered on the ground by an army of mostly volunteer observers. Launched early in 1937, Mass Observation’s opening venture took place in Bolton (named ‘Worktown’ in MO’s publications). The mission was to document the townspeople\u2019s everyday lives, including their leisure pursuits–cinemagoing (‘The role of the films in the life of a modern industrial community’) being foremost among these.[1]<\/sup><\/a> The all-encompassing inquiry was planned to embrace cinema buildings–decor, pricing, programmes, and so on; films, release dates, censorship, etc; the public’s responses to specific films and programmes; films in schools; the place of cinemagoing in local leisure patterns.[2]<\/sup><\/a> In April 1938, five hundred or more patrons of the town\u2019s newly-opened Odeon cinema answered a Mass Observation questionnaire<\/a> about their film preferences.[3]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

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All of our eleven Bolton interviewees were contacted directly or indirectly via the town\u2019s thriving scene of writing groups and local history workshops and societies. This resulted in several group interviews as well as couple and solo interviews.\u00a0For information about the interviewees, and for access to audio and transcripts of their interviews, click on the names in the list. To see locations and photographs of many of the Bolton cinemas mentioned in the interviews, visit the \u2018Interactive Map\u2019 link below.<\/p>\n

Interviewees<\/h5>\n