Davenport Street

In spring 1937 number 85 Davenport Street in Bolton became the headquarters for an anthropological project known as the ‘Mass Observation’ led by Tom Harrisson.

Tom Harrisson was a young Harlow and Cambridge educated anthropologist who in 1932 had undertaken fieldwork in the New Hebrides. While in the far pacific Harrisson had study the local tribesmen by observing them going about there every day lives rather than by interviewing them and asking them questions. It came as something of a surprise to Harrisson that even on the other side of the World the people of the New Hebrides had heard of Bolton in Lancashire because of its connection with Unilever soap.

In early 1937 Harrison met with Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings and the ‘Mass Observation’ project was born. The underlying principle of the project was that they would simply observe how people behaved to gain a better insight into how Britain’s increasingly complex society worked.

Bolton, which was known as ‘Worktown’ in the project, was chosen as it provided a typical northern industrial town, with a mass of working-class people., the very people that Harrisson and other academics knew least about.

In ‘Worktown’ Harrisson and his team of observers employed the same techniques of just watching without questioning or interacting those being observed that Harrisson had used in the New Hebrides.

Source: ‘The Town that Vanished: the rise and fall of Lancashire’s biggest mill town’ by Ian Robinson (ISBN:978-1-9996883-0-1)