Project Description
The Harris Museum, Art Gallery & Library, known as The Harris, is located on the Flag Market in the centre of Preston. We were proud to host the Whittingham Lives Hidden Histories: Alternative Futures exhibition in our galleries in 2018. The exhibition explored the history and legacy of Preston’s Whittingham Asylum through personal experiences, social history items and creative responses.
Whittingham Asylum falls geographically outside our current collecting policy for social history, but there are a number of items in the collection that were used in the exhibition. These include an archive of colour photographs of the hospital, a framed photographic print of Whittingham Asylum Orchestra and a sepia postcard of the Whittingham train.
There are also a number of box files in our information files that relate to an exhibition at the Harris in the 1990s. These include transcripts of interviews with former patients and staff at the hospital which were useful for researching the exhibition. Access to these items for research can be granted by emailing [email protected].
