The Collections Story - A New Catalogue for New Town Images

Warrington-Runcorn. The key to a new home of your own. It makes sense to buy a newly built home and Warrington New Town offers you a wide choice of distinctive areas in which to live.

- Warrington New Town informational brochure, 1980s

When the new towns of Warrington and Runcorn were built between the 1960s and 1980s, information brochures describing the new homes were sent out to encourage people to relocate. But a picture speaks a thousand words, and it was the images of these futuristic living spaces that drew people in.

An archives catalogue is of course a description of our collections, but if we have digitised parts of our collections it does offer us an opportunity to share images online. One of the largest sets of digital images is the photograph and slide series of the Warrington and Runcorn Development Corporation, which was the organisation responsible for establishing the new towns of Warrington and Runcorn. The records include board minutes, building plans, reports and promotional brochures, along with a vast number of photographs and slides showing the full development, from views of the area before construction to completion.

In 2021, we received grant funding from the Wellcome Trust to repackage, label, and index over 18,500 slides and 14,000 photographs from the collection. The funding was a small part of a larger grant of £427,809 awarded to a network of 11 archives that hold records relating to new towns. Further details on the larger project can be found at www.newjerusalems.info. One of our project aims was to digitise over 3500 of these images. These images are now available to search and explore on our catalogue for the Warrington and Runcorn Development Corporation.