IT IS has been the experience of many a drinker to be unable to remember the name of the pub where he enjoyed a pint.

But an old-timer who comes to Looking Back with a query on these lines can be forgiven his fogged-up memory.

For it's not ale that's caused him to forget but the passage of almost 45 years since the pub he asks about disappeared from Blackburn town centre.

Coming from Church Street it was, he recalls, the first pub on the left in Victoria Street - where the Halifax bank now stands on what is present-day Grosvenor Way - and a little unusual for having a couple of steps at its entrance.

The New Inn was knocked down in September, 1954, along with neighbouring premises and others facing the old market square round the corner in Lord Street, to make way for the new Littlewood's store - later Hitchen's - which occupied the spot for 20 years until the premises were integrated in the third phase of the town's shopping precinct.

The New Inn had a name that belied its antiquity. In the early part of the last century - before 1825 - it was one of Blackburn's four coaching inns and briefly, in 1812, while the town's theatre in nearby Ainsworth Street was standing empty, also housed a stage for plays.

The original New Inn stood - at a time when this length of Victoria Street was still part of Ainsworth Street - on the corner of Church Street at the spot occupied in this view by the Victoria Carpets store and, above it, the still-remembered Vee Cross Caf. The block on which they stood together with 14 other shops, an auctioneer's and a fruit warehouse was bought by Littlewood's in 1947 and its demolition led to what was the biggest transformation of the town centre for 100 years.

Many of the businesses uprooted were long-established - Greenbank's drapers to the right of the New Inn had been there for 90 years and, next door, the double-fronted outfitters' shop had been the home for 65 years of a business founded by John Forbes, who had captained Blackburn Rovers in their FA Cup triumphs of 1892 and 1893 and was a director of the club until his death in 1928.

Another effect of the Littlewoods purchase was that the New Inn became a free house, selling out-of-town Hammonds beer in the years up to its closure, rather than the Lion Ales of Blackburn brewer Matthew Brown which had leased the privately-owned pub from before the First World War.

When the company's new store - the 55th in the Littlewood's chain - opened in October, 1955, hundreds of shoppers queued for more than an hour round two sides of the building, eager to get in after the ribbon-cutting ceremony was performed by 18-year-old employee Margaret Fineberg, the "Miss Littlewood" of that year.

A feature of the new store was its 104-seat "all-day" cafeteria where a "typical luncheon" of soup, steak pie, boiled potatoes, peas and sponge pudding cost 2s 9d (13Up) - the equivalent of £2.07 today.

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