Ask anyone in Glossop to name the town's most popular tourist attraction and they would have pointed to the Heritage Centre.

Opened by Glossop Heritage Trust in the summer of 1986, it was the window of the world of Glossop to people from all over the world.

It wasn’t long before visitors from all over the globe were joining day-trippers and residents on information-seeking trips to the Henry Street building.

The first two months of opening saw more than 2,000 people pouring through the doors, many of them heading for bound copies of the Chronicle to research their family trees.

Centre manager Peggy Davies explained: “People have been reading their family histories in the newspaper, seeing births, marriages and deaths and other events of town life.

“We have had visitors from Scandinavia and other European countries.”

But it wasn’t only the Chronicle files that was packing folk into the two-storey Bank House building.

Part of one room had been converted into a Victorian kitchen, with utensils and furniture of the day and a couple sat in front of an open fire. There was an old cotton loom from a Hadfield mill, artefacts discovered at Melandra Castle, photographs, exhibits, relics and reminders from two world wars.

Gleaming sports trophies, a Glossop Grammar School uniform, everything from Glossop’s glorious history brought together and collated by the trust.

As the months and years rolled on, the centre became more and more popular, school parties and Glossopdale groups paid visits and the visitors’ books were peppered with the names of people from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South America and countries in Europe.

The centre, which was officially opened by the Duke of Norfolk, was open six days a week and by the time it closed in 2009, the number of visitors had reached six figures.

Read more from the Glossop Chronicle

Click here for more of the latest news

Click here to read the latest edition of the paper online

Click here to find out where you can pick up a copy of the paper