ON a reluctant drive down Preston New Road, Blackburn, the other day, I noticed a road sign, situated at the junction of Shear Bank Road and Preston New Road.

To my surprise, it proclaimed that, should I wish to travel ahead at the next junction, I would be entering not the town centre, but the Cultural Quarter.

Having been reasonably au fait with Blackburn's centre for nigh-on 70 years, I wondered how I had managed to miss this hub of enlightenment.

Instinctively, I pondered how a first-time visitor looking for this new Athens of the North, with its covert promise of lofty refinement and taste, would react to his or her findings.

I hoped that my mythical visitors had not travelled too far, and, at best, would be cultural anthropologists, innured to culture shocks.

But, as I parked up and picked my way through the Cultural Quarter's eddying detritus; rotting discards and petrified plastic, I realised that the road sign must mean culture as in biology, with its attendant propagation of bacteria and other micro-organisms in an artificial media, which, somehow, led me to ruminate on the Gang of Eight in their ivory tower.

It escapes me why.

As a politically-correct compromise, may I suggest the road sign be re-lettered Subcultural Quarter, therefore avoiding disappointment for the unwary traveller.

JOHN LEAVER, Manorfields, Whalley