A PIECE of Blackburn's past will be consigned to the history books when demolition teams move in to raze the oldest piece of the town's former workhouse to the ground.

The Victorian buildings at Queen's Park Hospital, which date back to 1881, are being bulldozed in a £150,000 operation to make way for extra car parking space at the expanding hospital.

The work, being carried out by Excavation and Contracting UK Ltd and sub contracted to Blackburn-based Andrew Connolly, will take until March to complete.

Some parts of the historic workhouse will be saved, including the stone, bricks and slates which will all be salvaged and recycled. The stone has to be sorted by hand.

For staff of the Blackburn, Hyndburn and Ribble Valley NHS trust, the landmark project has been long awaited.

Chief executive John Thomas said: "We first said we wanted to demolish these buildings 16 years ago and it has taken this long. It is a landmark that we can finally demolish buildings which were totally unsuitable for modern mental health services.

"For a while now we have had the newest part of the hospital - the new mental health unit - next to the oldest, but now we will have the additional car parking, which we desperately need. So I am very pleased we are raising it to the ground."

The buildings, which were home to patients in the mental health unit until July 2001, have already undergone a "soft strip", to take out furnishings and equipment, to see if anything could be reused.

Now the team are moving in to take apart the buildings.

The buidlings hold around 200,000 tonnes of Yorkshire stone and 6,000 slates and countless bricks, which will be crushed.

Mike Shorrock, deputy head of estates for the trust, said: "Demolition is a very specialised job these days.

"It's as difficult to demolish as it is to rebuild. Anything reusable will be saved and sold on, which makes most demolition projects pay for themselves."

The block itself was built in the 1870s as part of the Blackburn Union Workhouse and housed the lunacy wards. Nearby there were vagrant and probationary wards and the sick and fever wards.

The workhouse was built at a cost of £30,000 and designed to hold 700 inmates.

Its prominent site, overlooking Blackburn, was chosen deliberately to serve as a reminder to local people of the consequences of failing to work hard.

It was renamed Queen's Park Hospital by the NHS.

The site, once cleared, will become a car park of 182 parking spaces, costing £340,000 to build, with lighting and security. Next to it will be new accommodation for staff who live on site.