David Dimbleby looks at Bolton's art collection for new BBC programme

David Dimbleby, the well known chairman of the BBC television programme Question Time, recently paid a visit to our art stores.

David Dimbleby examines Workstown art works in our stores He was in town filming a new arts series called The Seven Ages Of Britain for BBC1. Bolton will feature in the programme because of the its links with the Mass Observation.

In 1937 a group of artists, students, film-makers and local people assembled to begin the Worktown project. Led by anthropologist Tom Harrisson they were sent out to document the every day activities of the town's people.

While recording in the town centre David Dimbleby demonstrated the recording methods used by the Mass Observation. He was filmed eavesdropping on conversations and secretly photographing people.

The previous day he visited Bolton Museum Aquarium and Archive to look at art works produced by Worktown observers Julian Trevelyan, Humphrey Jennings and Humphrey Spender. These include photographs, collages and paintings created as part of the recording process.

Bolton is one of many destinations featured in the programme that also travels to Italy, Germany, Turkey, India and America to demonstrate how art can tell the story of our nation.

The Mass Observation project is important because it attempted to capture the ordinary lives of working people using methods that had previously been used to study people from other cultures. To this day the Worktown project stands as a unique and valuable document of Bolton as it was in the last years of peace before the Second World War.