A campaign is underway to turn the former home of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis into a museum.

The two bed roomed terraced house on Barton Street in Macclesfield where Curtis spent the late 1970’s with his wife Deborah and daughter Natalie is on the market for £115,000.

Now a crowdfunding campaign by life long fan Zak Davies is trying to raise £150,000 to turn the house into a museum and preserve the memory of the bands front man who committed suicide in 1980.

Rather than it be taken by developers or sold for development, says the campaign, “we feel a place with such cultural significance with such an important man attached deserves to be made into a museum and somewhere that Joy Division fans from around the world can come to pay respects and learn about Ian Curtis.”

Curtis was born in Stretford in 1956 but the family moved Curtis was born in Manchester on the 15th July 1956, but the family moved to Hurdsfield, just outside Macclesfield, where at the age of 11, he won a scholarship to the King’s School.

Ian had met Deborah Woodruffe while they were both still at school in Macclesfield. They were married in August 1975, at St Thomas’s church in Henbury, a few miles west of Macclesfield. Ian and Deborah lived first in Hulme and then in Chadderton, and in May 1977 moved into 77 Barton Street in Macclesfield.

After seeing the Sex Pistols play in Manchester in 1976, he was convinced that he could make it in stage, meeting Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook, who were trying to form a band in Salford but lacked a singer.

The Joy Division story is well known, but on the eve of the band touring America, Ian killed himself at his home in Macclesfield in May 1980 and while they were many clues and theories about his death, to this day, the reasons are not known.

You can contribute to the campaign HERE

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