Industrial Revolutionaries at the Harris Museum

Industrial Revolutionaries is a major new exhibition spanning 150 years of Preston’s history, looking at the personalities that helped create the modern world.

Delving in to the lives of key individuals, and the movements they created, the exhibition reveals their influence, political history and global impact through over 70 objects, including portraits, major loans and key items from the Harris collection.

Numerous objects are newly conserved and on display for the first time. Many of the issues that concerned the people of Preston 150 years ago – employee rights, child labour, alcohol and the need for temperance, elections and economic uncertainty – are the very issues that concern us today in 2010. People in Preston created a new industrial world and then fought to redress the resulting problems of inequality through radical social reform and political activism. Preston is a microcosm for understanding the North West of England’s industrial pioneers and their ideas – ideas that shaped the modern world.