IT HAS been an interesting summer at Ambleside’s Armitt Museum and Library, writes JANE RENOUF.

In a bold move to take history out onto the streets, the Armitt’s Still Lives summer exhibition spilled out through the museum doors and round the village, where portraits of local people taken over a century ago graced the windows of shops and businesses. Names familiar to Ambleside have been drawing curious glances and attracting interest even from visitors for whom a trip to the local museum would rarely be a number one priority.

The 80 or so portraits on the streets and on display in the Armitt were picked from an enormous archive of 17,800 historic portraits in the Armitt collection; the life’s work of the Brunskill Brothers at their Bowness Photographic Studio between 1865 and 1906.

The exhibition this summer has carried these unique studies in Victorian life and times far and wide, thanks to the digital world. Armitt curator Deborah Walsh is not at all sure how the beautiful ‘Miss Midgely,’ about whom very little was known, ended up on the News Desk of The Times. As a result, the image of this comely young person was tweeted and re-tweeted numerous times, and came to the attention of a couple from Nottingham:

“We had a call from a man who told us he is the grandson of Miss Midgely," explained Deborah. "Soon after this, he and his wife won a week’s holiday which they spent at Newby Bridge. While they were in the area, he brought us a photograph of Miss Midgely on her wedding day. He remembered her very well from his youth, as she lived to a ripe old age, and told us many stories about her life. It was rather a strange experience after becoming so used to seeing her as a young woman to suddenly know so much about her life to come.”

The success of the Armitt’s street-wide initiative lies in the way it is relating faces from the past with their living counterparts, some of whom still bear their names, and their beautiful, quiet quality of timelessness is intriguing visitors alike:

“At the heart of Still Lives are the families most closely associated with the development of Ambleside; those which date back to the establishment of the woollen industry and whose fortunes rose and fell with it – the Mackereths and Braithwaites, the Bensons, Tysons, Birketts and Hawkriggs,” Deborah said. “Quite a number of their family members emigrated to America and Canada - and quite by chance, Still Lives coincided with a rise in visitor numbers from North America. New contacts have been established with American and Canadian descendants of families such as the Braithwaites indicating that Still Lives is more than just a collection of old photographs. The pictures are still those same people, whose lives continue to connect with our present.”

To make this point, rather than printing the photographs in the usual brown and sepia tones, the Still Lives portraits have been reproduced with a blue tint. “Some people were a bit critical of this, but we felt it gave them a more contemporary, immediate feel. We hoped people would look at them as real people, existing in the moment of the photograph, rather than relics of the past.” added Deborah.

Local families have until the end of October to view the Still Lives exhibition, before it rejoins the Brunskill archive. However, there will be no let-up in the work of volunteers in digitising the thousands of Brunskill glass plates still waiting to see again the light of day:

Every week volunteers see new faces in these amazing portraits, and even the poses they struck or the studio props reveal the image they wished to portray to their families, friends and neighbours and descendants.

Connecting past with present extends way beyond the Armitt’s portrait collection. Herbert Bell, pioneer photographer and leading member of the Armitt, painstakingly captured local landscape as it lay a century ago. Little could he have dreamt that one day, these images would become crucial to environmental work today, assisting the National Trust, National Park and the Environment Agency in re-wilding the fells. The relevance of the Armitt’s treasures in connecting past and present can only grow in a fast changing world.

For further information contact the Armitt 015394-31212.