1938. With Britain in recession and another war looming, living conditions in the industrial heartlands are grim.
A group of idealists travel to Lancashire to document working-class life, hoping to spur government action.Treating the locals like a remote tribe from a distant land, they rely on scouts and interpreters to understand the unfamiliar world they observe.
Edward, a Cambridge graduate, falls for Molly, a young cotton weaver. He believes she can give his life meaning; she sees in him a glimpse of escape. But can their love survive as the gulf between their worlds begins to threaten their bond?
Worktown is a fictionalised account of the Mass Observation field study in Bolton, 1937–38, asking whether real change can come from passive observation—or whether true impact
demands action.
Bill Hodson is an award-winning short story writer and the author of several plays. His debut novel, Tracking Back, was published in 2023. His latest work explores the 1937–38 Mass Observation expedition to Worktown.
Born and raised in Bolton, and from a family of mill workers, Hodson gives voice to the local people who were studied—voices that went unheard at the time.
Bill explains: “I lived in Bolton until I went to university, but I was unaware of the Worktown project until my twenties when I came across a collection of Humphrey Spender’s photographs taken in 1937/38. Spender’s work was immediately fascinating as a window on to a vanished world and its connection to my parents’ youth.
As I came to learn more about the Worktown project and its place in the broader scheme of Mass Observation I began to wonder what the local people had thought about being observed by a group of young intellectuals mostly from London and the South of England.This was the starting point for the book. What was the disconnect between the high-minded intentions of the founders of Mass Observation to capture the detail of everyday life and those being scrutinised as if they were exotic birds or members of a remote tribe?
Worktown amassed an unmanageably vast archive of material but the opinions of local people about the project itself and its findings were not sought. I have tried to provide that voice through fictitious characters,imagining their feelings, but grounded in my research and my own family’s knowledge of Bolton and its people.
I believe that Worktown still has much to tell us today about the gap between the North and the South, richand poor, those who tolerate inequality and those who act to change it.”
