The Whitaker

The Whitaker is Rossendale's beloved combined art gallery and museum, housed in an elegant Victorian pavilion within Whitaker Park in Rawtenstall — the principal town of the Rossendale Valley. Named after Richard Whitaker, who donated the park to the people of Rawtenstall in 1891, the institution has served the valley's communities for over 120 years as a free cultural resource combining art, natural history and the social history of this distinctive Lancashire valley.

The building, a charming late Victorian park pavilion of red brick with terracotta details, occupies a picturesque position within the park's grounds, surrounded by mature trees, flower beds and open green space. Whitaker Park itself is a well-maintained Victorian pleasure ground that remains a focus of community life in Rawtenstall — a public open space donated in an act of philanthropic generosity characteristic of the Victorian mill-owning class that also built the Rossendale Valley's schools, libraries and chapels.

The Whitaker underwent a major refurbishment and reopening, improving its facilities and renewing its displays while respecting the character of its historic building. The galleries now present the collections with intelligence and accessibility, serving both local residents for whom the museum is a familiar landmark and visitors discovering the Rossendale Valley for the first time.

The art collection includes fine and decorative arts with a particular focus on work by artists with Lancashire connections and on Victorian and Edwardian painting. The natural history collections document the flora, fauna and geology of the Rossendale Valley and the surrounding Pennine moorland, providing ecological context for the valley's dramatic landscape. The local history collections explore the valley's distinctive industrial character — particularly its slipper and footwear manufacturing industry, which gave Rossendale a specific industrial identity distinct from the cotton towns of the wider Lancashire plain.

Rossendale was famous throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries for its slipper and felt slipper production, and The Whitaker preserves this heritage alongside the broader history of the valley's textile manufacturing and the communities it sustained.