We’re celebrating nine years at Adswood!

It’s nine years, just about to the day, since Richard Roberts got the keys and moved in to our Adswood premises. Before that he had a much smaller space at Poynton and had very much outgrown it.

 We’re showing some pictures here of those early days, when our building was just a shell. In fact, the building goes back to the 1910s and was previously used by Bolton’s Superheaters - hence calling the unit ‘The Pipeworks’.

 Richard was always keen to make the building as welcoming as possible, so reworked the office space at the front to make the reading room you see here. Before we had that lovely heated room, we made do with a cabin. We all remember huddling in there in the winter and to warm up next to the portable heater.

 In 2020 the Richard Roberts Archive was set up as a charitable trust, and Richard gifted the premises and contents to the trust. We had just two or three volunteers then.

 Now we have about twenty-five volunteers and nearly 270,000 catalogued items. This figure includes magazines and ephemera, and adverts and beer mats in our product files. Recently we’ve acquired a high-quality scanner and are scanning magazines as they come in. We already have nearly a quarter of a million scanned pages!

 Here’s to the next nine years…