Families in Haslingden gathered at the town’s library to watch pictures glide past a tiny stage, as a hand-turned scroll and music transformed a quiet reading room into a miniature theatre.
The event, called Crankie Day, formed part of a wider effort to reconnect residents with their town’s heritage.
Run under the Haslingden Big Lamp regeneration project, the celebration invited people of all ages to build simple crankie devices, illustrate their own stories and see performances. The day showed how heritage funding can become visible not in planning documents, but in shared creativity at the centre of town life.
Old scrolls, new audiences
A crankie is a compact storytelling machine: a long illustrated scroll wound between two spools and housed inside a box with a viewing window. As someone turns the handle, the pictures pass slowly in front of the audience while narration, song or music carries the plot, echoing moving panoramas popular in the nineteenth century.
At Haslingden Library, local artist and performer Tom Byrne guided participants as they sketched local landmarks, family memories and imagined adventures onto paper strips before threading them into homemade crankie boxes. Children and adults took turns operating the cranks, discovering how pacing and simple lighting could change the mood of a scene as much as the drawings themselves.
Stories lighting up Haslingden
Crankie Day also showed how the Big Lamp project is reaching beyond building repairs and street works. The National Lottery Heritage Fund-backed Big Lamp programme is investing several million pounds in Haslingden’s Deardengate area and includes a community micro-grants pot for events, workshops and training that help residents explore the town’s past.
One of the scrolls developed for the library sessions is set to return on 5 December 2025, during the town’s Christmas Lights Switch-On event. A special crankie performance will focus on the story of Michael Davitt, the Irish campaigner who spent part of his childhood in Haslingden, linking the town’s industrial heritage to wider struggles for justice.
For organisers, the ambition is that crankie-making becomes a regular feature of community life. As the Big Lamp project continues through to 2026, events like these suggest that the town’s transformation will be measured not only in restored stonework and new shopfronts, but also in the homemade theatres and shared stories emerging from its library tables.
