From cotton to gold: extraordinary collections of the industrial North West

Two Temple Place, London, 31 January - 19 April 2015

Tucked away near Temple Tube station, Two Temple Place is an unexpected cultural treat in a part of London dominated by office blocks and law firms. The house was once the office of the wealthy businessman William Waldorf Astor, and remains an exquisite example of neo-Gothic opulence. (For Downton Abbey fans, its magnificent Great Hall was the location for the wedding of Lady Rose to Atticus Aldridge). In itself, the house is worth visiting for its wonderful interiors - a late Victorian time-capsule in a city that is ever-changing.

Now run by the Bulldog Trust, Two Temple Place is opened up to the general public for three months a year, when the winter exhibitions are on show. These exhibitions are designed to promote an awareness of museum and gallery collections from around the UK in a prestigious central London venue. This year's display, From cotton to gold, draws on collections from three Lancashire museums: Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, Haworth Art Gallery in Accrington and Towneley Hall in Burnley.

Here I must confess my own regional bias. I was born in what was once part of Lancashire, and am proud of my roots in the north-west of England, shallow as they are. Although my family history is not one of textile producers, but rather railway workers and labourers, the rapid industrialisation of the nineteenth century - and subsequent slow decline in the mid-twentieth - has had a profound effect on the region as a whole, and still resonates today. The wealth that was generated for some by many has long since gone, but its legacy, not least in the form of museum collections, remains.

The Queen Street Mill loom, with medieval manuscripts behind

It is easy to forget the human cost of just how cotton was spun into gold, particularly when surrounded by the gorgeousness of Two Temple Place. Clattering looms, hot and humid conditions, long hours and the potential for horrendous accidents - all typified the working conditions for mill workers during this period. These stories can still be explored in Pennine Lancashire today, through the displays at Helmshore Mills and Queen Street Mill Textile Museums. But this is not the point of this exhibition. Rather, it focuses upon the ways in which historic collections have been formed, trying to discover what this can tell us about the lives and times of those who made them.

In fact, few of the collectors highlighted in the exhibition actually said much about what motivated them to collect. And even though these men (and they are all men) were prominent in their local communities at the time, their voices are relatively muted in the display itself. So what meanings can be drawn from the objects on display - which include books, coins, Japanese prints, ivories, beetles and Tiffany glass - other than that they are both eclectic and fascinating reflections of the interests of their collectors?

I was most drawn to the fact that many of the artefacts on display are resolutely hand-made or products of the natural world: there is a strong sense of nature in the culture on display, and complex links with the medieval past. The first things that caught my eye were heavily illuminated manuscripts, beautiful fifteenth-century Books of Hours with such vibrant colours that you might forget that some of them are 600 years old. (It seems like I'm not the only one who's a sucker for medieval manuscripts - the British Library's Medieval Manuscripts account has over 24,000 followers on Twitter). The early printed books on display (I want to use the term 'incunabula', as I had to look up what it meant) often had hand-drawn additions, whilst the Japanese wood-block prints (ukiyo-e), collected by Thomas Boys Lewis, were similarly the result of complex processes of production. There is Tiffany glass, with its motifs drawn from the natural world, Louis Comfort Tiffany himself strongly influenced by both the Pre-Raphaelites and medieval stained glass, and private press books from the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Vincent of Beauvais' Mirror of the World, printed in 1481. The world is divided into Asia, Europe, Africa and 'Inhabitable'

And there are natural history specimens, such as Arthur Bowdler's beetles and George Booth's birds, each themselves transformed through human agency into artefacts, literally pinned down or encased. Through such processes, the natural world could be consumed and understood in a domestic context, made comprehensible and contained.

Carved ivories, including scrimshaw, a West African carved elephant tusk and a miniature bust of J. M. W. Turner

Upstairs in the Great Hall, there are further elaborate nature-culture interactions: intricately carved ivories, beautiful human bodies drawn by Millais (the Pre-Raphaelites again) and Turner watercolours, by an artist famous for his sublime depictions of nature.

I'm probably reading too much into their motivations, but I think these men were, through their collections, grappling with the changes in making and living that their own industries were generating. It seems to me that their predilection for artefacts of the more distant past, laboriously made by hand, or for things that had strong natural connections, was a meditation on the increasingly mechanised and rapidly changing world in which they found themselves and made their fortunes. Whether or not they were nostalgic for times past and nature seemingly lost is now impossible to know. But what is certain is that theirs was a world of transformations: of water into steam, raw materials into finished consumer goods, rural into industrial, of villages into towns, and, as this exhibition demonstrates, cotton into gold.

William Taylor's Peruvian diary (1913), bound in llama skin