Sixty years ago, Thornton folk may have watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on a television set similar to this one in a living room not dissimilar to this one (right).

What you see in the photograph is a mock-up of a living room of yesteryear, when people still lived in the stone cottages in Thornton now occupied by South Square Arts Centre.

The television, rescued from a skip by the centre’s arts intern Liz Milner, still works. You can sit in an armchair and watch films of village life taken by the Branwell Film Group, some of which have been converted to DVD format by Thornton Antiquarian Society.

“I got the furniture from car boot sales, charity shops and from my own posessions. They took about five or six weeks to source,” said Liz, whose internship at South Square ends in March.

The stage set she has devised remains in place until early January, which will be about the time South Square takes on a part-time curator to set up a permanent Thornton archive at South Square from material collected by members of the Antiquarian Society, currently stored in a large cabinet in the ladies toilet in the village’s community centre.

The society’s chairman Terry Miller, who has lived in the village all his life and remembers what the stone cottages, without indoor amenities, used to be like in winter, believes that visitors are showing greater interest.

He said: “The extension of the Great Northern Heritage Trail in the next two years beyond the railway viaduct into Clayton will mean more walkers and cyclists will be coming here to see what Thornton has to offer.”

South Square curator David Knowles is planning to use some of the £46,000 awarded from the Heritage Lottery Fund to put the Antiquarians’ archive online.

In a sense, Thornton has always been a global village, due to the extraordinary worldwide interest in the three writing Bronte sisters, who lived in the village until their father Patrick became Curate in Haworth.