Roll up! Roll up! Conserving circus collections at Blackpool’s Showtown museum

Opening in the summer of 2022, Blackpool’s new museum, Showtown, explores Blackpool’s nationally significant circus collections. With capital costs covered, the Blackpool Museum Trust now needs to focus on creating and conserving the first ever permanent collection within the museum. 

Showtown will be Blackpool’s first ever museum and Blackpool Museums Trust are working with a collection of partners to make it a top attraction in Blackpool. The museum will share the rarely seen stories of British popular entertainment and will actively collect and display the history of circus, magic and illusion, ballroom dancing and variety. Their 1,200m² of themed galleries will feature at least 800 items at any one time, from a 500,000-strong nationally and internationally significant permanent collections.

We awarded Blackpool Museums Trust £10,000 to support the conservation and display of a significant circus history collection at Showtown. All objects required conservation and mounting, framing or other specialist installation before display. The collection includes posters of Doodles the Clown, drawn by George Cooke, portraits of Norman Barett, an elephant stand and headdress and more.

Here are some pictures of the collection:

This grant comes from our Preservation and Conservation grant programme. Within this grant programme, we support the care of collections and smaller to medium sized museums may be eligible for an AIM grant.

Find out more about the Showtown Museum.