BCA Collaborates with Science and Industry Museum on Factory Records Exhibition

British Culture Archive collaborated with the Science and Industry Museum on Use Hearing Protection: The Early Years of Factory Records, a major exhibition exploring the formative years of one of Manchester’s most influential record labels.

The exhibition ran at the Science and Industry Museum from 19 June 2021 to 3 January 2022 and focused on Factory Records’ early years, from 1978 to 1982, before The Haçienda and before the label became central to Manchester’s international cultural identity.

As part of the exhibition, BCA presented a dedicated display of photographs documenting ‘Factory’s Manchester’ during the period in which the label emerged.

The BCA section included previously unseen photographs by Thomas Blower from the Rock Against Racism Northern Carnival at Alexandra Park in 1978, alongside work by Red Saunders and Luis Bustamante. Together, the photographs placed Factory’s early story within the wider social and cultural life of the city.

Rather than showing Factory Records in isolation, the BCA display helped ground the exhibition in the Manchester that surrounded it: a city shaped by working-class communities, music, politics and post-industrial change.

The collaboration remains an important part of BCA’s exhibition history, showing British documentary photography within a major public museum context and connecting the archive’s work to one of Manchester’s defining cultural stories.