Previous News and Exhibitions

Do you want to exhibit?

We encourage local artists and heritage groups to show their work in our temporary gallery. It’s free, but we ask you to set up your exhibition. Please get in touch if you’d like a slot in our programme.

We also have two temporary exhibition cases for displaying smaller guest collections. Just drop us a line if you have a collection you’d like to share with the local community and visitors to the area.

impact image

We have three exhibitions during 2019:

  1. Celebrating the Heritage Centre's 25th Anniversary which occurs on 10th June
  2. The Bellingham Peace Celebrations which were held 19th July 1919
  3. The Forestry Commission 100th Anniversary which was founded 1st September 1919

Capture territorial poster3

Revealed for the first time, several historic and not so historic images of people from the Heritage Centre's extensive photographic archive of local people.

Spot friends, neighbours and family on our Walls of Local Fame.

Help us identify the many unknown people, captured at home or at work, at leisure or very much 'at play'.

Scattered throughout the 'walls' will be specially-taken images of local people today, taken by talented members of North Tyne Photography Group.

This will be the third collaboration between the Heritage Centre and this force of creative and prolific photographers.

Capture poster for exhibition June 2016

This exhibition celebrates the 140th anniversary of the birth of Walter Percy Collier on 20 July 1875. Though known as the photographer of Bellingham, he was born in Newcastle, moved to Manchester, married a girl from Bootle on Merseyside in 1905, opened a shop in Great Crosby, moved to Formby and returned to Newcastle to work with his brother-in-law. And all this happened before he opened his shop in Bellingham around 1913!

This new exhibition will display the early photographs that WP Collier took on Merseyside and later on Tyneside for his brother-in-law, Harry Ord Thompson, but there will be many local pictures as well. There will be a display of family photography from the formal Victorian portrait to the amateur snapshot, with some of the early photographic kits. The 1930s darkroom was a world away from the instant images of the digital camera and mobile phone.

  1. Over the Hills - Tales from a Northumbrian Farm - Sunday 20 September 2015 Sunday 1 November
  2. Sewing the Landscape - Monday 30th March 2015 to Friday 15th May
  3. The Nature of Line
  4. Two Northumberland Artists and their Landscapes