The monster that ate Burnley.
Categories: uncategorized
Date: 15 March 2011 01:12:02
I think I like Burnley. If I ever went there before - and as far as I remember I did briefly, but it was over 25 years ago - I don't remember much of it. I probably just passed through, set foot, saw enough of the place to tick the mental "I've been to Burnley" box. The town seems to be having a hard time. Its more than just a little bit run down. Full of shops and bars and churches that look like they went broke and hae been boarded up ever since. A bit sad in a way that, say, Preston or Bolton aren't. Or even Jarrow or Sunderland, though they are probably poorer places.
A boarded-up old church for sale:
Cops on the prowl by two derelict pubs over the road from the grandly namd "Burnley Central Station"
Even the old courthouse is for sale, which seems a sad failing of civic pride and urban planning.
Nice TownHall though:
Burnley is one of a string of old milltowns stretching east from Preston into the Pennines, across the north side of industrial, urban, Lancashire about an hours drive north of Manchester, weapped round Pendle and marching up the valleys in the general direction of the Yorkshire Dales. Blackburn, Accrington, Burnley, Nelson, Colne. Once upon a time they were small wool market towns until water power and canals turned them into cotton-spinning mill towns, and then coal (Burnley is also at the northern edge of the Lancashire coal fields) and the railway made them briefly, industrial powerhouses. giants. But the coal was mostly shut down by the 1940s, cotton-spinning moved away to Asia in the 60s and 70s, general textile produciton changed to artficial fibres and moved down to the coast, and Burnley was too close to Manchester and Preston to become a commercial or educational centre - and too far from them to be a commuter suburb.
But even then, its a beautiful place, although it is difficult to take photos of it that don't look like some stage Northern urban decay. Every view has the hills and moors in the background.
Its hard by the moors, and easily accessible by road and rail. And there are more than a hundred thousand people living in these valleys. So why are the shops and the pubs shut down and falling apart? Because, I suspect, its been destroyed by developers. Even poor people spend money - but they spend it in large chain-store sheds put up all over the place ripping the urban fabric apart. There are railway stations all around - but with only one slow train an hour on most routes, they are little more than halts.
The centre of town doesn't come up to the grandeur of post-industrial desolation. It just looks neglected and bypassed and - on a cold day in March - damp.
So here is the Monster that Ate Burnley:
And just to show we care, here is the little river the town is named for:
