Thanks to National Lottery players, the Jukebox: emblem of youth in post-war Britain Project (also subtitled the Teenage Revolution) was an outstanding artistic and heritage programme which celebrated the boom in youth culture which followed the introduction of the jukebox to post-war seaside towns in north-west England.
The project was a collaboration between Mirador Arts and Lancaster University Library. Funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the project took place across 2024.
With the growth of milk and coffee bars from the 1950s, the jukebox gave teenagers an ‘escape’ from parental gaze and freedom to explore their own tastes in music and fashion. Teenagers growing up in Blackpool, Lytham and Morecambe experienced the ‘first wave’ of popular music on their doorstep and lived close to the first factory to produce jukeboxes in the UK.
The project raised awareness through a creative programme which took place in locations in Lytham St Annes, Blackpool, Morecambe and Lancaster. It featured accessible and fun content including a series of original artistic, performance, participative and heritage events to reveal the influence of the jukebox on youth culture.
The project will also captured and creatively presented, the voices, views and memories of people who lived through this key period of social change. The memories recorded were used to inform the creative programme and form a future archival collection held by the Special Collections and Archives at Lancaster University.