THROUGH the centuries Blackburn has owed its development to textile production. Even back in Tudor times — it is known that St Mary’s was renovated in this time, in 1524 — the town’s economy depended on a mixture of woollens and linens.

By the early years of the 17th century the town and surrounding hamlets, such as Livesey, Witton and Mellor, was at the forefront of the production of fustian, a cloth which comprised linen warp and cotton weft.

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The area was well known for its ‘checks’, the result of dying one of the threads, before ‘greys’ were produced, a plain printing fabric, which was later finished in London.

Yarn crofts existed where yarn was repeatedly soaked in sour milk and then exposed to the sun, an old form of bleaching.

In the later decades of the 1700s the town was renowned for its calicos and the surrounding fields appeared white, with the materials being laid out in the sun.

In 1801 the population was 12,000 and the weavers worked at home, on their own looms, until James Hargreaves’ Spinning Jenny slowly took production out of homes and into newly built factories.

Blackburn’s earliest powered spinning mills were found in Wensley Fold.

By 1901 the textile industry attracted workers from all over the country and in 1901 the population had grown to almost 130,000.

The opening of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal made transportation much easier and economic expansion was given a further boost by the arrival of the railways.

Other manufacturing began to develop during the 1800s, notably metalwork and engineering, including textile machinery.

As the town prospered, it was given a charter of incorporation and the new town council met for the first time in 1851, and over the following five decades an infirmary, town hall and technical college were opened.

Lancashire’s cotton trade continued to expand until the First World War, but as the crucial Indian market was lost, 79 of the town’s 150 mills closed between 1919 and 1936.

New industry began to develop as firms moved in to take advantage of the labour force, mainly women workers, who were used to factory work.

Among them was Philips, which later became Mullards and made radio valves, and Scapa Porritt, which produced felts for the paper industry. Blackburn has undergone many changes, with the demolition of its mills, the redevelopment of the town centre and its massive housing programme.

Several thousand houses were pulled down in the 1960s and new council housing estates were created on greenfield sites on the town outskirts to house those whose homes had disappeared under the bulldozer.

n Blackburn was recorded in the Domesday Book as Blacheborne in 1086. The origins of the name are uncertain.

It has been suggested that it may be a combination of an Old English word for bleach, together with a form of the word “burn”, meaning stream, and may be associated with a bleaching process. Alternatively, the name of the town may simply mean “black burn”, or “black stream”.

The presence of a sacred spring — perhaps in use during the Iron Age — provides evidence of prehistoric activity in the town centre, at All Hallows Spring on Railway Road.

All Hallows Spring was excavated in 1654 and found to contain an inscribed stone commemorating the dedication of a temple to Serapis by Claudius Hieronymus, legate of Legio VI Victrix.