The World of Martin Brown opens at The Harris

Saturday 23^rd May sees The Harris open its doors to another exciting exhibition in Gallery One. The World of Martin Brown exhibition explores the career of illustrator Martin Brown, well known for his work with the internationally recognised Horrible Histories series.

Starting with his very early drawings going back to childhood, the exhibition will be ideal to inspire young minds and features a number of spots where children can stop and sketch an idea. Theres even a Trail booklet to complete as you make your way around the space. We stopped by the space to see the works for ourselves and meet the man behind them.

Having been in three venues previously the exhibition, created by Seven Stories, features every Horrible Histories cover since the series was first published in 1993. Something that Maritn himself is proud to see. "Those early covers are special to me because they remind me of the early days, when the books were just a concept and I remember the meeting, we had at the publishers where the idea was floated around and I sketched out what became that logo during a ten-minute chat. It's wonderful to see where that idea went"

Martin was already working with the publisher on a series called "coping with…" which explored topics like parents, pets and teachers, which featured a little about the history of the topics, when he asked about creating the series that would then dominate his career for over 30 years and covered every part of history from the Tudors to the Romans and more.

Preston is the ideal stop off for the exhibition as it fits perfectly with the latest in the series Horrible Histories: Football, delving into the history of the game and some more modern history. Preston was one of the founding teams of the English football league, something which is mentioned within the book, and the Dick Kerr Ladies played a pivotal role in some of the women's history of the sport.

Martin spoke about how drawing some of the Dick Kerr Ladies matches really stood out in the process of creating the book. Using photographs of matches at Deepdale where 25,000 people came out to watch the team play Paris in the 1920s and then playing in Liverpool against St Helens Ladies where there were 53,000 people in the crowd! The team has such a fascinating history and he's hoping the book will help spread it far and wide as just one of Lancashire's stories.

The original touring exhibition has been modified to include original artifacts from The Harris' collection, with Mratin supplying illustrations unique to Preston for a number of the pieces. These include a Witches Bridle from Lancashire, a piece of equipment from history that was included within one of the first Horrible Histories books and Martin realised that the illustration needed modernising to fit with today's world so created an original sketch to accompany. There is also a display within the sketches of the Horrible Histories: Football area of Lily Parr's football boots, said to be the same pair she was wearing when she broke a man's arm during a penalty shootout after he said that no women would ever be able to score against him!

The exhibition opens tomorrow and will be a great way to spend half term and beyond in Preston, especially for budding artists but also for those not so keen. As Martin says "Drawing is fun! If there's any message in it, it's that we can all draw!" so why not head down to The Harris, get your inspiration and try your hand at drawing something from Lancashire's history.