A photo showing a rare view of Bridge Street from St James’s Street’s junction with Manchester Road. is one of my favourite views of Old Burnley.
But, more than any other part of town, this area reminds me of the parts of London written about by Charles Dickens in some of his more famous novels.
You will know Dickens created an abundance of memorable characters (humorous, grotesque and sinister). Some, like Fagin in “Oliver Twist”, for example, he placed in one of the London rookeries, crowded clusters of mean tenements and breeding places for crime.
The area around Bridge Street was, to my mind, like that.
It shared a name, Wapping, with one of the more notorious and poorer districts of London.
The London original was part of what is now Tower Hamlets, near the City. Wapping means the “settlement of Waeppa’s people” and it was formerly a marshy area which, from the late 14th Century, after the construction of a wharf, became a hamlet called Wapping-on-the-Wose (mud).
The marsh was drained in the early 16th Century and this was followed by the construction of warehouses and tenements.
Convicted mutineers and pirates were brought from the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark to Wapping’s Execution Dock, where they were hanged. Their bodies were left in cages while three tides washed over them. Captain William Kidd was dispatched in this fashion in 1701 and a modern riverside pub is named after him.
The reputation acquired by Wapping – its crowded tenements, huge warehouses and its reputation for crime – sealed the area’s fate. It became overcrowded, something of a slum and a byword for poverty and it was not until the later 1920s that London County Council, as a consequence of an Act of Parliament of 1926, implemented a comprehensive slum clearance scheme.
In Burnley the same Act was used to clear a number of its poorer districts. Burnley’s Wapping had been subject to considerable change in the early years of the 20th Century when road improvements in St James’s Street necessitated demolition in Wapping itself.
Before this time the area bounded by St James’s Street, Bridge Street, Cannon Street and Hall Street had become not unlike its London namesake. There were other streets, like Water Street, Cross Street, Townson’s Street and Robert’s Square, but they all contained a similar mixture of property, mills, warehouses, larger houses, which became inns and later lodging houses and numerous small unplanned cottages and tenements.
It was not uncommon for a cottage to share a wall with a cotton mill. We know, also, that there were numerous cellar dwellings in this area and a considerable number of iron and brass founders and black and white smiths had premises cheek by jowl with mean dwellings.
A reconstruction of the area, based on a map, re-surveyed in 1890, shows the mills, warehouses, tenements and tiny cottages lost in smoke pouring from the mills, foundries and domestic chimneys.
Of course, Burnley’s Wapping was not a place of execution, but it did have something else in common with its London namesake. I refer to its proximity to a river.
The presence of Water Street, once a wide fully developed street with warehouses and houses but later a narrow passage, would indicate this. In Burnley the river was the Brun which, as it was confined into a narrow stone channel, often overflowed. It was not all that long ago that people could remember the flood marks on several buildings in the area.
One of the pictures I have chosen to accompany today’s article shows one of these buildings (notice the marks by the gas lamp).
When built it was a substantial house once occupied by John Eltoft, one of Burnley’s pioneer cotton masters. He was living there in 1800 but, later, it was taken by Hargreaves and Son of Burnley’s Old Brewery, which was just off Bridge Street, near the river. It is known Mr Hargreaves did not live there so it is supposed the building was converted into a warehouse becoming the Black Dog Inn before 1820.
Only a few doors away was the Greyhound Inn, which from the picture, you can see was a Massey’s House. In the early 19th Century, along with other small inns and lodging houses in Wapping, these two properties became notorious for badger baiting and cock fighting.
These sports were followed by some of what might be described as the lower orders in the days before football took over. It ought to be pointed out that, so far as we know, the types of badger baiting and cock fighting arranged were particularly cruel.
The third picture is of Bridge Street. The image was taken before 1925, when the Sun Inn was closed, but after the reconstruction of much of the right side of the street. This was completed early in the century so I suspect the photo predates 1914.
However, if you look carefully, you will see, at the cross roads of Nile Street and Cannon Street, just beyond the two men standing in the road (middle distance, right) the first letter of the name of a famous Burnley shop. The letter is a “W” for Richard Webster’s, one of Burnley’s department stores. They also ran a pawnbrokers business at these premises and their sign (the famous three golden balls) can be seen high above the store.
Webster’s occupied the site of the Black Dog and one of the larger cotton mills of the area. Another of the mills can be seen in this photo. Just below the Sun Inn, there are two shops, one of which was kept by my grandfather. Then there is Nile Street and, on the other side of the street, a former cotton mill which many of you will remember as William Smith’s textile warehouse, though part of it became Ellis’s wallpaper store, when I was a boy.
This picture is another of my favourite views of Old Burnley. Of course I remember it many years after today’s image was taken.
The Sun Inn, once owned by the Towneley family, became Hudson’s hardware and leather store and was one of Burnley’s great local shops. Inside, when it became a shop, the building was not changed all that much. It was still possible to see where the bar had been and some of the little snugs and dining rooms survived the transformation to retail premises.
My father took me into the shop on several occasions and, knowing some of the sales assistants, spent some time catching up with them and their families. Often he let me roam round the shop with the strict, and ignored, warning not to touch any thing.
Even in those days I used to wonder why it was that so many valuable items were left in unguarded rooms off the main store. But it was a delight to wander about Hudson’s, and, if you have not done it, you will not know what I mean – the variety of things for sale, the smell of leather of the highest quality, the little rooms each devoted to one of the shop’s specialisms. My kind of retail heaven!