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Pankhurst Centre – Rooms of Our Own

A project to reveal the hidden ‘herstory’ of the Pankhurst Centre

By Karen Shannon · February 24, 2022

Thanks to funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, we are thrilled to be working in partnership with The Pankhurst Trust to uncover a chapter of the centre’s history, which until now has largely gone unexplored.

Although now recognised internationally as a site of historic importance, as the former home of Emmeline Pankhurst and the place from where the suffragette movement was born, for many years the Pankhurst Centre’s significance was overlooked. It was thanks to women’s activism that the quest began in the 1970s to save the building, which faced the very real threat of demolition in 1978. This hard-fought campaign, and the vision that led to the creation of a museum and feminist hub, has never been fully explored until now.

The key focus of Rooms of Our Own will be the Pankhurst Centre archive, with volunteers aged 18-25 working on the documents and photographs which already exist in the archive, as well as capturing the stories and voices of campaigners from the 1970s to 2014. As it progresses the project will use the archive to inspire creativity, including the creation of original digital artwork, music and film.

Find out more about the project here.