BURY Art Gallery celebrates its centenary with perhaps the most fitting exhibition it could have staged.

The show features all manner of paper sculptures, apt given the town's paper-making history and that the Moss Street gallery was created thanks to a local paper mill owner.

"Paperworks" starts tomorrow (Sat Sept 8) and features the work of 36 artists from across the UK, including Bury's Dean Hughes.

All shapes, sizes and types of paper are represented in the exhibition. These range from Kaye Cox's organic shapes inspired by rock formations, to Chong Boon Pok's tiny birds folded from Swan cigarette papers, from Susan Cutts' white paper stiletto shoes to Manel Guell's newspaper suit.

The exhibition runs until October 27. The gallery is open from 10am to 5pm, Tuesday to Saturday. THE gallery was opened in 1901 to house the collection of Victorian art given to Bury by the family of Thomas Wrigley, an important local paper manufacturer.

Thomas Wrigley was born in Bury in 1808 on the Bridge Hall estate and inherited his father's paper mill near Heap Bridge, amassing various works of art before he died in 1880.

Six years later the Mayor, Alderman John Hall, is reported as hoping that the town would one day see a gallery, but he did not want to levy further taxes on its citizens to pay for it.

But good news was not long in coming. Mr James Kenyon MP offered one thousand guineas towards the cost, and then came details of the Wrigley gift. His family presented his collection to Bury in 1897 to commemorate the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria, on condition that the town provide a building suitable to house it.

Other monies were raised, and the town adopted the Public Libraries Act.

The contract was finally won by Messrs Thompson and Brierley of Bury for the princely sum of £21,259. Architects of the 18th Century English renaissance style were Messrs Woodhouse and Willoughby of King Street, Manchester.

So the Moss Street gallery was constructed, and the foundation stone laid in 1899 by Oswald Osmond Wrigley, who on the same occasion was admitted the first Freeman of the Borough.

Two years later the gallery and library was formally opened by Lord Derby.

Naturally, the Bury Times was there, and on October 12, 1901 printed a special supplement to mark the opening of "Bury Art Gallery and Free Library".

It detailed at length the history of "How the town acquired the institutions", along with articles about the architecture, the sculptured friezes which encapsulate the liberal arts and sciences, and critiques of the paintings, among them the Turner masterwork "Calais Sands", which can be seen there to this day.