With one more year to go before the Sankey photographic project in Barrow ends, staff and volunteers are being inspired to share it in ever more creative ways, as SARAH FRENCH discovers

It is not unusual for towns and cities to host social media pages of old photographs, taking visitors on a nostalgic trip back in time to see how grandparents and ancestors lived before them.

What is unusual, however, is for a town to have its own single and comprehensive collection of thousands of images taken by one family,­— a unique and historic record.

Thanks to father-and-son photographers Edward and Raymond Sankey, who had their own photography shop and studio, and the generosity of their family, Barrow-in-Furness is the lucky and proud beneficiary of such a collection. It is believed to be the biggest of its kind and documents Barrow comprehensively and parts of the Lake District from 1890 to 1970. The collection was kept in the garage of the Sankey family home in Penny Bridge, near Ulverston, and was donated by Joan Sankey, the widow of Raymond’s grandson, and the family in the hope it could be made accessible for the local community and future generations.

Seeing the North with Sankey is a two-year heritage photography project which has seen staff and volunteers so far digitise and repack 15,000 glass plate and acetate negatives and 20 handwritten postcard books and albums produced by the father and son.

Signal Film and Media, an award-winning film and digital media company based in Barrow that produces high-quality, professional short films and delivers a wide range of community engagement media projects, embarked on the journey in 2016 to rehouse and catalogue the collection, winning significant National Lottery Heritage Funding for the project.

With the full collection now digitised, and put into secure and permanent storage at Cumbria Archives in Carlisle, the next stage has been to bring it to life through research, creative workshops and online exhibitions, one of which was launched at the end of last year.

The Sankeys...Scenes of Winter’s Past was curated by Sankey project volunteers who had worked for a year uncovering unseen images from the collection and illuminating it with their own anecdotes and personal reflections. The pictures showcase wintry scenes across the county in the early decades of the 20th Century, from icy mountain tops in the Lake District to Barrow’s Abbey Road coated in snow. Often taken in tricky weather conditions, they reflect how intrepid and determined the Sankeys were in capturing their images, as well as showing the grit and determination of Cumbrians surviving and thriving in hard winters, like that of 1929, and the fun of skating, curling and climbing the fells in deep snow and ice.

The Winter’s Past exhibition, which has been viewed by more than 10,000 people and can still be seen online, was expanded as more images were uncovered.

Project manager Julia Parks said: “The Sankey Family Photography Collection is a totally unique record of Barrow’s history capturing the major events, people and places from all over the town. “Over Christmas we had the chance to look at a few more boxes in the collection and discovered a whole host of new and unseen images we felt we must share in this extended exhibition. There are nearly 15,000 unique images including more than 9,000 negatives in the collection and we are about a third of the way through cataloguing them all.”

Other online exhibitions that have brought together pictures in themes include one for International Women’s Day and another for Black History Month, as well as two Photos in Focus exhibitions.

The project has also delivered several connected activities including creative workshops, Facebook Live Q&As and will be delivering interactive heritage programme for schools.

The images have been mapped, coloured, animated and the postcard messages transcribed.

The next exhibition, in May, will take the Barrow Blitz as its theme, marking the 80th anniversary of the town being bombed in 1941. Images show buildings that were destroyed and may have faded from memories.

Another mini project is Behind the Postcard, involving adults across Cumbria, and the Exhibition in an Envelope project, where participants first respond to an image, post it to another person who adds their response before the collaboratively created pieces go into an online exhibition.

The broad range of subject matter within the collection offers no end of possibilities for themes and further research including the use of horse-drawn vehicles, the steelworks, shipyard, residential areas and town events and parades.

Around 25 regular volunteer researchers and curators are involved in the Sankey project, which continues to reap rewards. Julia said: “There is so much passion for the collection locally. As the project has progressed, the volunteers have got more and more involved and are getting more and more creative in their ideas for how we share it.”

Volunteer Les Eveson said: “This project is important, especially at the moment. It gives a sense of being connected to the people of the time. We have their legacy. And we know how important it is to look after it, because a beautiful building today might be gone tomorrow. It’s a feeling of being part of it.”

Enid Milligan added: “I think the project is bringing to life the days as my parents and grandparents grew up, to actually remember the town as it was, because so much has changed.”

The discovery of yet more photographs means that the pool of volunteers will be similarly expanded, with Signal giving training to and working with more people across the Barrow area. Some may also be able to shed fresh light on the places and people in the photographs.

Julia added: “We can draw on loads of archive research, but we often don’t know the names of the people in the pictures. There’s so much that we don’t know. What’s exciting for me, is working with a group of people who all have very different experiences and they all bring totally different interpretations.” As well as The National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and the Garfield Weston Foundation also supported the project, which is due to end in spring 2022.

Before then, a final, major exhibition will be held at Barrow Dock Museum.

• Anyone interested in getting involved in workshops, sharing stories or volunteering can contact Julia at julia@signalfilmandmedia.co.uk T: 01229 838592

For details, visit signalfilmandmedia.co.uk @SignalFilmMedia on Facebook | @Signal_Films on Twitter | @SignalFilms on Instagram #SeeingTheNorthWith