The only Museum dedicated to Primitive Methodism, a grassroots movement within Methodism that started in England in 1807 at a camp meeting organised by Hugh Bourne, high on Mow Cop, a bleak hill on the border of the Staffordshire Moorlands and the Cheshire Plain. It has been said that whilst Wesleyan Methodism was ‘for the poor’ Primitive Methodism was ‘of the poor’: miners, millworkers, farm labourers and fishermen were all inspired by ‘Freedom, Equality and Fraternity’; women, then excluded from most pulpits, became travelling preachers; and many of the movement's adherents, through its passionate advocacy for social justice, went on to become trade union leaders and MPs. From North Staffordshire the movement spread out across the world to America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Africa.
In 1932 in Britain the Primitive Methodists joined the Wesleyan and United Methodists in an Act of Union, to form the The Methodist Church in Britain.