William Arnold Almshouses, Glen View Road.

Step back in time to the Burnley of 1800, and you would find little more than a huddle of houses round St Peter’s Church. Most of the Burnley we know today was farmland and countryside. But in the next 100 years the population rocketed from about 3,000 to more than 100,000. So the Burnley we see today is really a collection of “villages.”

In the next few weeks I will be describing my travels around these “villages” and, with fellow members of the Burnley and District Civic Trust, town planner David Ellis and Padiham artist Duncan Armstrong, giving Burnley Express “Best of Burnley” awards. These awards will be presented at a special evening at the Yorke House Club, Burnley, on April 6th.

This week’s “village” is the area “Up Manchester Road,” Express photographs of which, from today and from days gone by, are currently on show at the Coal Clough Lane Branch Library [in 1976].



If you were to knock on the door of one of the big houses in Manchester Road or Rosehill, you might almost expect to be answered by a smartly-dressed butler. For, although it is the 1970s, these houses, surrounded by large gardens and trees, take you back to the days of Victorian and Edwardian England. They look down on the rest of Burnley — both literally and metaphorically.

Built in Burnley’s cotton town heyday, high above the much less palatial dwellings of the workers, they were the homes of the mill owners, the manufacturers and the moneyed professions. Turrets and towers, battlements and bowers, brought a touch of romance into the uncompromising workaday world, and a new meaning to the saying that an Englishman’s home is his castle.

But these houses, massive by present day standards, were only comfortable to live in because servants were cheap to employ. Now the servants are gone, replaced by electrical appliances. But because electricity this century costs more than flesh and blood last century, the big houses have become uneconomic and inconvenient as family homes. In some cases they have been split up to form apartments. Others have been repurposed. Sunny Bank has become a school, Green Hill a club, Fern Hill a private hotel. Even Rosehill House itself, once the home of the influential, mill-owning Dugdale family, has become a hotel.

Change on such a massive scale could have had disastrous results on what used to be considered the most attractive district in Burnley. It is a tribute to the people of the Manchester Road district that almost all of the buildings look as good as ever, and that the trees, bushes and flowers still flourish in the gardens. The buildings and gardens together make this still the most attractive entrance to Burnley.

High up Manchester Road, one of these houses - admittedly smaller than others - remains a family home with a difference. When Dr and Mrs Luke Collins bought the building, it had little to recommend it other than the somewhat grandiose name "The Castle" and a few mock battlements to give substance to this title. Cement-rendered and clad in ivy, there was little hint that underneath lay an architectural treasure. An architectural expert happened to pass by, and identified the building as the work of Edgar Wood, a Middleton architect whose works and ideas were once world-famous. Wood used a newly-invented substance, reinforced concrete, to build the flat roof of "The Castle" - one of the first of its kind in the world.

Intermingled with the big detached houses are substantial terraces and large suburban semis. They were built at a time following the success of the first garden cities. Set back from roads, in gardens large enough to support bushes and even big trees, the idea was to capture the flavour of the countryside in the days before transport was efficient enough for people to actually live outside the towns. Nowadays the sort of people who built the semis live in Cliviger, Pendleside, or the Ribble Valley, enjoying the countryside at first hand. That is, until there are so many of them that they see one day that the countryside has retreated, and is as far away as ever.

At the centre of this week's "village", taking the place of the traditional village green, is Scott Park. It opened on August 8th, 1895, thanks to the £10,000 will of the late Alderman Scott, and was a wonderland of pools, an ornamental fountain, a secret stream, tangled undergrowth and towering trees: a child's paradise. But today's youngsters are getting short measure. Gone is most of the undergrowth, gone are the pools, gone is the fountain. Vandals have been at work with their aerosol sprays and penknives. They even burnt down the nearby hut used by the Scott Park Veterans' Association. Even the Scott memorial, commemorating the man who gave us the park, has not remained unscathed. The Parks Department has fought back, but its staff are already stretched, coping with Burnley's ever-increasing areas of grassland and parks. Another factor in Scott Park's sad decline has been our changing economy. One man with a modern mowing machine can tackle more lawns than half a dozen Victorians with their primitive equipment. But to cope with the complexities of a Victorian park still takes time and men rather than machines, so the winding paths, groves of bushes and ornamental decorations are replaced with large areas of grassland.

The "village" church stands nearby, a fine stone building with rich stained glass windows, dedicated to St. Matthew, and another tribute to Victorian philanthropy, built with money provided by the Rev. William Thursby and Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth. Consecrated in 1879, it was joined in 1905 by an equally impressive building: the Manchester Road Methodist Church. Unlike the simple, classical style of most of Burnley's other Methodist chapels, this church was built in the Gothic of the Church of England. The church has now been demolished - a big loss to a town that is desperately short of decent architecture - to make way for a group of flats. Thankfully the tower was spared by the developer, just as the spire of the former St James' church had been. Follies in the grand Victorian sense of the word.

But the public houses seem in little danger of demolition. The Rose and Crown, the General Williams and the Bull and Butcher have all been recently cleaned or pointed by the brewers, and carved stonework, previously hidden by years of grime, now makes a very attractive addition to the urban scene.

Another centre of “village” life is the recently-opened Coal Clough branch library, which demonstrates that modern buildings do not all have to be featureless shoe boxes. Its irregular shape, the glass vestibule, and the pyramid-cum-spire on the roof, combine to give a very interesting building, and the dark windows and the cobbled entrance are other pleasing features. Somehow it’s fitting, if a little unfair, that one of Burnley’s best new buildings should be in the same area as many of its best older buildings.

But the Manchester Road district has another architectural treasure. Palatine Square was once Burnley’s equivalent to London’s St John’s Wood, with its tree-shrouded houses looking out on to what was once the residents’ own private road. Each house is individually designed, just slightly different from its neighbour, both inside and out. With stone cleaning and a little environmental improvement, perhaps through making it a conservation area, Palatine Square could become one of Burnley’s proudest possessions.