Astley Cheetham Art Gallery and Library

The Astley Cheetham Art Gallery was originally built in 1901 as a lecture hall, by John Frederick Cheetham, a local mill owner. It became an Art Gallery in 1932 when Cheetham donated his own collection of paintings, including works dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Art Gallery has also since recieved "Aske Hall" by Turner from the National Arts Collection Fund to add to it's personal collection, which is displayed continuously. There are several temporary exhibitions by local artists and groups throughout the year.

Within this building is also the public library and Tameside's Local Studies Library where records are kept of census returns, births. marriages & deaths and various other information about local history.

Local Studies Library

The information contained in the local studies library can be divided into eight categories. Each one is concerned with recording and preserving information about the towns of Tameside.

Books	divided into towns and aspects such as textiles, transport, labour, women and lancashire dialect, journals available
Newspapers	local papers from 1855, the Manchester Guardian from 1821-1864 and the Cotton Factory Times from 1885-1937 available on microfilm
Census records	street indexed and some categorisation by surname for 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891 available on microfilm
Parish registers	There are great number of Parish records stored at the libary
Maps	There are all sorts of old maps from all over the tameside area
Photos	There is a huge archieve of photographic material that would keep one interested for hours
Archives	There is alsorts of archieved information in the Library
Oral history tapes	There is a lot of personal accounts of information from people recorded and stored at the library.

This site developed and maintained

by Ridgefield-Pennine Ltd.
This page last updated $Date: 2008/07/18 21:12:01 $