Although our galleries were closed for much of last year, we welcomed more visitors than ever to our website. We hope that many of you will continue to enjoy our digital offer this year too. To whet your appetite this is a look back at some of our most popular blogs from last year.

Our most popular web pages last year were our two big online exhibitions. The 1980s images in Rock Against Racism felt as relevant as ever at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement rose to international prominence. And the fantastic images collected for our Lockdown Museum showed what an amazing and generous place Oldham continued to be throughout these difficult times.

The top exhibition blog last year looked at one show that we had been forced to postpone. The Legacies of Biafra exhibition would have featured in our programme for 2020. Instead we published this blog to give a taste of what is still to come.

Particularly popular during lockdown were the Remember When features produced by Oldham Local Studies and Archives. These short blogs with fascinating images were all popular but the top two featured the Elk Mill and the Belgrade Hotel. The latter of these also included a link to some fascinating archive footage – if you missed it first time around it is well worth a look!

One article by our Natural History Curator also attracted a lot of interest. This blog told the story of the fascinating historic links between two museums – Oldham Museum and Stepney Museum. The article also features one of our most popular paintings. If you haven’t seen it before it is a portrait of our curator, Fred Stubbs, working on the natural history collections in the late 1920s.

Finally, our social history blogs covered a wide range of subjects in 2020. Perhaps it shows a mood for escapism and nostalgia that the two most popular both had a whimsical feel. This look back to the golden age of postcards featured some excellent historic jokes. But most popular of all was this discussion prompted by a rubber Andy Pandy doll from the Gallery Oldham collections.

We hope you enjoyed this look back at some of our blog highlights from 2020. We can’t wait to share more stories, objects and images with you in 2021. And, of course, we look forward to welcoming you into our building once again when circumstances allow.