All aboard Rochdale's time machine

Photo: Touchstones Rochdale

Professor Jigget

Rochdale’s old and new clubs, societies and collectors are being recruited for a pop-up people’s history festival coming to the town centre later this year. The Time Machine is a free event taking place during the first weekend in June and uses a bring along 'Antiques Road Show’ style format.

Organisers are calling out for local leisure organisations, hobbyists and individuals with an interesting personal passion or collection to come forward to fill an exhibition space with their home-grown stories, artefacts, photographs and ephemera.

Event curator, Harriet Roberts, said: "The weekend will include a market place of Rochdale’s oldest clubs and societies in an expo, ‘The Lost and Founded Societies of Recreation’. We want to showcase some of Rochdale’s long-established clubs, creators, makers, players, performers and societies to display their history and explain what they do in their spare time and why.

"We are also looking for individual hobbyists with a passion for collecting to curate their own table top museums, whether that’s ceramic owls, postcards, historic memorabilia or holiday souvenirs. The weirder and more wonderful the better."

The Time Machine takes place from 11am-4pm on Saturday 1 and Sunday 2 June 2019 at The Pioneers Museum, St Mary’s on the Baum and The Baum Pub. The festival theme goes back and forward in time and includes lots of fun activities and interactive opportunities for visitors to recall memories of the past and help to shape the future vision of the redevelopment of Rochdale’s town centre.

Other festival activities include:

• Screenings of rare local footage from the British Pathé News Archive in Audrey in the UK’s amazing Vintage Mobile Cinema.
• A Cabinet of Curiosities - An object handling area with a chance to get hands on history with some of the collection from Rochdale’s Touchstones’ collection.
• Household History Detectives will be examining objects brought along by visitors
• Let’s Make History community scrapbooking area for people to contribute to the creation of Rochdale’s memory bunting.
• The Baum pub will be serving a menu of dishes and drinks through the decades.

The two-day pilot event called Time Machine is being organised by Harriet Roberts from place making specialists, thinkingplace on behalf of Heritage Open Days as part of the 25th anniversary of the main UK festival. It’s being supported locally by Rochdale Business Improvement District (BID) with sponsorship from Rochdale Development Agency.