The Rochdale Pioneers Museum occupies the original building at 31 Toad Lane where the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers opened their consumer cooperative on 21 December 1844. It is the birthplace of the modern cooperative movement — the shop that established the principles of member-owned, democratically-run enterprise that spread from this terraced street in Lancashire to become a global economic force.
The museum is small but well designed, using the preserved interior of the original shop — the counter, the shelves, the till — to tell the story of how twenty-eight working-class flannel weavers changed the way ordinary people could organise their economic lives. The founding principles on display have the clarity of good thinking: open membership, one member one vote, return of surplus to members. The wider context of what cooperative enterprises have become globally gives the small shop on Toad Lane its full weight.