Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery is not often the centre of national cultural attention. Yet this autumn it hosts The Nature of Gothic, an exhibition that would be at home in any major city.

Developed with the Institute of English Studies, it brings together treasures from Blackburn’s own Hart Collection with loans from the British Library and the V&A. Visitors can see William Morris’s Strawberry Thief, Rossetti’s monumental Astarte Syriaca, and rare medieval books once handled by kings.

For Blackburn, this is a moment of pride. To walk into the museum and see such treasures is to be reminded that culture does not belong only to the capital. Lancashire has long been a place of innovation and rebellion, of mills, migration, and creativity in hard times. To host this exhibition here is to insist that our towns are part of the cultural story, not its margins.

Yet the Gothic has always carried tension. The illuminated manuscripts dazzle with vines and grotesques in their borders, but the margins were never free — the authority of the centre remained. It’s a reminder that working-class lives often appear in culture as decoration, while the story at the centre is written by others.

Rossetti’s Astarte Syriaca shows that vividly. The goddess figure is modelled on Jane Morris, the daughter of a stableman and wife of William Morris. A working-class woman made eternal, but silent. Her face becomes symbol; her life fades into myth.

Morris’s Strawberry Thief carries a quieter contradiction. Celebrated as ‘truth to nature’, it is really horticulture — the well-tended version of nature that fits neatly onto wallpaper. It captures a bird in flight but fixes it forever, safe and repeating. The pattern is beautiful, but it conceals the cracks, much as the Gothic revival itself decorated inequality while poverty persisted beyond the walls.

That contrast feels sharp in Blackburn. The museum was born from Victorian collecting — from the tastes of those who could afford to gather the beautiful and the rare. Yet it stands in a town built by labour, where knowledge and art were everyday practices: chapel choirs, union leaflets, kitchen-table creativity. The museum holds treasures, but the streets around it hold stories just as vital.

Outside its doors, Blackburn’s skyline still carries the trace of mills and spires. Creativity here was always collective, built on the rhythm of the looms, on the hum of people working and making together. That living tradition continues today. In January, the same galleries will open their doors for the Blackburn Art Open, filled with paintings, sculptures, and photographs by local people. Where Gothic heritage represents, the Art Open participates. It reminds us that culture lives not only in what is preserved, but in what communities continue to make. Blackburn’s strength has always been its makers – from textile workers to today’s artists – people who turn limited means into extraordinary expression.

The Nature of Gothic is valuable because it brings world-class art to Blackburn, but also because it asks hard questions about what survives, what is lost, and who gets to be heard. The cracks that John Ruskin once admired in Gothic stone still matter, not as decoration but as reminders of absence. Ruskin admired those irregularities and sought to revive them in his vision of a Gothic renaissance, a return to honest craft and imperfection that he saw as morally redemptive. Yet his ideal was also a retreat, a kind of solace for those dismayed by the harshness of their own industries. It was, perhaps, a manipulation of nature and labour alike: beauty re-forged to make a safer world for those who could afford to stand apart from the smoke and the noise. The cracks he celebrated were never simply metaphor; for the workers who built those cathedrals and factories, they were the daily condition of life itself. They are spaces where other voices might grow.

Blackburn’s exhibition is more than heritage, it’s an invitation. It shows that culture is not only the privilege of those who can collect it, but the inheritance of everyone who creates. Beyond the vitrines and the walls of the museum, people are still making, painting, writing, and shaping what comes next.

Culture lives where people insist on making it. To see that recognised in Blackburn is both a celebration and a challenge — to keep those cracks open and let new voices speak through them.

By Peter Shukie

Main image: credit Robin Zahler

 

The Nature of Gothic is at Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery until December 13, 2025.  For more information, click here.