AFTER last week'smention of the the upcoming anniversary of the opening of Blackburn's "new" market on November 11, 1964, I am reminded that its rooftop car park was open to the public much earlier.

So it was - the previous December.

Opening it nine months ahead of schedule - with the mayoral Rolls-Royce being first up the ramp - the town council's plan was to ease Christmas traffic congestion although only 180 of the eventual 400 places on the new car park were available at the time.

But unlike the new market when it opened 11 months later, the public did not flock to the new facility.

Civic leader Alderman George Eddie stressed that the charges at the new car park were "very reasonable." Indeed, they were - just six old pence (2p, but equal to about 25p today) for the first two hours; double that for three hours and five times more for all day.

And as extra tempters there were free gifts of Christmas turkeys for the owner of the 1,000th car using the rooftop and for the 2,000th, 3,000th and 4,000th. But it took a whole week for the winner of the first one to arrive - 24-year-old Hugh Williams, pictured here with his girlfriend, Margaret Bradley. And it was more than a fortnight after Christmas when the second prizewinner rolled up.

Just 30 to 40 motorists a day were using the car park. One attendant sold just six tickets in an entire eight-hour shift. On a Saturday six weeks after it opened, the car park remained nearly empty while surrounding streets were congested with parked cars.

That was the council's problem - parking on the streets and open sites was free. Additionally, there were no traffic wardens to patrol the ones with waiting restrictions and the town did not get any yellow lines until 1965. And, in any case, with the new market development still incomplete, many shoppers found the new rooftop car park too remote from the existing market and the bulk of the town-centre shops.

The boycott went on for months and it took the opening of the new market and new shops in the development below to turn the tide. But paying to park in Blackburn did not fully catch on until many of the empty sites earmarked for redevelopment - like that for the wholesale market alongside the new rooftop car park - were built on and traffic wardens were introduced in 1966.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.