Blackpool's homage to town's showbiz history, Showtown, shortlisted for prestigious Museums Change Lives Award

Blackpool’s iconic Showtown attraction has been shortlisted for a prestigious award.

Showtown’s groundbreaking exhibition, Through Our Eyes: Little People Beyond the Circus, has been nominated in the Museums Change Lives Award 2026.

The special exhibition challenged outdated narratives around little people in entertainment and put lived experience at the heart of how that history was told. 

The museum is one of just three organisations nationally shortlisted for the Inclusive Spaces Award, recognising museums that explore complex and divisive histories in an increasingly polarised world. 

For Showtown, the nomination reflects a community-led approach that has been at the heart of the museum since it opened in 2024: not shying away from the uncomfortable parts of entertainment history, but confronting them openly, sensitively and collaboratively. 

Telling history through their eyes

Through Our Eyes: Little People Beyond the Circus grew from research into Showtown’s nationally significant circus collections, which contain substantial material relating to little people who worked within the entertainment industry. 

Rather than interpreting that history on their behalf, Showtown worked with Little People UK and brought together a community group of little people and people with lived experience of dwarfism to decide how that history should be explored. 

Through regular meetings, the group ultimately chose to create an exhibition and worked alongside Showtown to co-produce everything from its content and design to its title and interpretation. The resulting exhibition deliberately moved the narrative beyond the circus spectacle and centred the experiences, independence, careers and lives of little people themselves.  

The museum itself also had to change. 

Display cases were lowered, object and text heights reconsidered, and lighting adapted to reduce glare at lower eye levels. Those lessons are now influencing how Showtown approaches its spaces beyond the exhibition.  

The impact on visitors has been significant. Evaluation found that 9 out of 10 visitors said they had learned that “little people” is the appropriate terminology, while one in five pieces of written feedback identified equality and not judging people by their bodies or abilities as the principal thing visitors had taken away from the exhibition. The exhibition encouraged vulnerability and curiosity in visitors, and helped visitors understand how the world is built with them, and not little people, in mind. 

The project is now reaching beyond Blackpool too. Showtown and the community group have developed a practical toolkit to share what they have learned and help other museums and archives approach collections featuring little people with greater confidence. Despite Showtown’s work focusing on historic material related to little people, this project’s method can be applied to collections featuring many marginalised communities. This toolkit was launched at the Group for Education in Museums conference on 9 September in a sector-wide confidence building workshop.

The aim is to create lasting change, encouraging more sensitive, inclusive representation across the museum sector. 

Rebecca Nuttall, charity administrator at Little People UK said:  “It has been a pleasure working on this project. Achieving an exhibition that celebrated people with dwarfism within entertainment and raised awareness of the language we use today has been beyond my expectations and incredibly satisfying. Showtown and the community group brought passion, sensitivity and care to a complex topic. Showtown’s commitment to sharing our learning through the toolkit and advocating for the community is an excellent legacy of our partnership and I look forward to seeing the future impact it can have.” 

Showtown continues to push boundaries 

This national recognition adds to a growing list of awards and nominations for Showtown since the museum opened in 2024, and Through Our Eyes is far from the end of Showtown’s ambition to tackle challenging histories. 

In February 2027, Showtown will welcome another major exhibition as part of We’re Still Here!, an ambitious LGBTQIA+ heritage project led by Abingdon Studios and in collaboration with the Grundy Art Gallery. 

The project will explore Blackpool’s LGBTQIA+ history and marks two significant anniversaries in 2027: 60 years since the partial decriminalisation of sex between men in England and Wales and 40 years since Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 Conservative Party Conference speech in Blackpool, delivered shortly before the introduction of Section 28. 

The exhibition will bring together community voices, oral histories, photographs, archive material and significant national loans, including objects from the V&A and Imperial War Museum, to explore stories which have too often been marginalised or left out of traditional museum narratives. 

Together, the programme reflects Showtown’s ambition to be much more than a museum looking back. Blackpool’s remarkable cultural history is a starting point for conversations about identity, representation, creativity and society today. If you’d like to find out more, please get in touch with Showtown. 

National recognition 

The Museums Change Lives Awards, organised by the Museums Association, celebrate museums across the UK that make a meaningful difference to the lives of their audiences and communities. 

The winners will be announced at a ceremony at Birmingham Repertory Theatre on Tuesday 3 November 2026, as part of the Museums Association’s annual conference. 

Showtown is one of three organisations shortlisted for the Inclusive Spaces Award. 

Find out more about the Museums Change Lives Awards 2026 here.