Harry Langton Collection

The Harry Langton Collection includes cultural and sporting items relating to the history of football and forms the core of both the National Football Museum in Manchester, England and the World Rugby Museum, housed in the East Stand of Twickenham Stadium.

It was created by Harry Langton (10 November 1929 – 6 September 2000), a sports journalist, after he took early retirement in 1972 from the Daily Express, a British newspaper, to launch Sports Design, a business publishing and selling sporting prints in London.

With premises in Islington and the Camden Passage antique market on his doorstep, Langton soon ventured into dealing in old sporting prints, paintings and antiques. There was little market then for football, his own special interest, and over the last two decades of the century he gradually built up a vast quantity of football art and antiques illustrating the long, and global, history of the game. All codes were included.

In 1981 an early display of this collection was viewed and praised by Sir Stanley Rous, the former Secretary of the Football Association, which encouraged further collecting with the idea of making it available to a wider public. Already it was attracting attention abroad. Some exhibits traveled to Germany for the opening of a Munich bank. Others appeared as black and white photographs at ‘Fussball in der Vitrine’ at the Galerie Littmann in Baumleingasse Basle in May 1982. In the spring of 1987 after many fruitless applications to municipal authorities for exhibition space, Sports Design presented ‘Football Art – the Langton Collection’ at the Wingfield Sporting Gallery in south-west London.

Serious recognition arrived when the Tyne and Wear Museums Service joined the Langton Collection with the ‘Soccer in Tyne and Wear 1879-1988 Exhibition’ in Newcastle. This ran for two months before moving to Sunderland in January 1989. There it was viewed by an Italian promoter who proposed taking it to Italy for the 1990 Football World Cup. Transported to Rome it was ceremoniously opened at the Spazio Peroni by Silvio Berlusconi, one of whose companies, Gruppo Fininvest, was the major sponsor, and drew visitors throughout the tournament.

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