Looking Back, with Eric Leaver

TIRED legs? It must be those steel stockings, dear. Well, if that's not what women are wearing nowadays, 50 years ago the Northern Daily Telegraph seriously suggested they would be.

And back in 1948 - when clothes rationing was just one of the many shortages hard-up post-war Britain was enduring - a big part of the appeal of the things to come forecast in the NDT's look at the future must have been a wardrobe that would not wear out.

For in addition to predicting that women would wear stockings made of steel, it added that they would literally last for ever.

Long-lasting outfits, the NDT added, would also be available for men - in the form of "attractive clothes" made of vinyl plastic or spun glass.

Apart from being cheaper and outlasting than those made of rayon, wool or cotton, they would, it was said, keep out the heat in summer and keep the cold out in winter.

The NDT was half-right in seeing the decline of leather-soled shoes, but, more precisely, its guess was that shoes would be all-plastic - again, with the stress on how much longer they would last.

Plastics and chemistry were mainstays of the lifestyle revolution it foresaw.

Houses would no longer be built with bricks, the NDT predicted. Instead, "from sawdust and chemicals we will be able to make a new kind of wallboard house that will be heat and fire resisting and will as a long brick and will be immeasurably cheaper." Inside the home, the furniture would be largely plastic - "sturdier, more attractive and cheaper than what we have now."

Nor would house painting be a frequent chore as paints would not only become brighter, they would also be made to last for years.

But if this guesswork was not wholly accurate, the NDT's future-gazing was closer to the mark with some of its other forecasts.

For, in addition to foreseeing the discovery of more of the then-new, life-saving antibiotic drugs and a continuing rise if life expectancy, the newspaper also saw the decline of the butcher's shop and the increasing use of food additives.

"Shopping at the butchers will be a thing of the past. For there will be a tremendous expansion of the frozen food industry. Chemistry will learn to put into our foods, without affecting the taste, all the essentials of good health."

Alexandra: From flicks into flames

THE YOUNG arsonists who last week torched a disused warehouse in Blackburn and left it a ruined shell had obviously no idea that if the building lived up to the claims once made for it, then, it was a world-famous building they were setting fire to.

For though it ended its useful days in 1993 as a bed firm's premises, the old canal-side building in Dock Street served for more than 50 years as the Alexandra Hall cinema. But more than that, in the days when going to the pictures kept 14 cinemas busy in Blackburn, the Alexandra boasted - week after week in its own advertisements - it was the first purpose-built picture house in the world.

Strangely, it stopped printing this assertion in 1954 after it underwent a big renovation and preferred instead to call itself "Blackburn's newest super cinema."

But if its claim to have opened on Easter Tuesday, 1906, was true, then indeed cinema historians may have been beating a path to the building.

Yet council rating records show that the cinema opened some time in 1909 - by when this supposed "first" had been well beaten and, indeed, the title of Britain's first purpose-built cinema had been won in 1907 by Colne's Central Hall which closed 15 years later.

The Alexandra stopped showing films in 1962 when the 542-seat cinema became a bingo hall before being acquired by Prestige Beds in 1980.

But for generations it was known as "Penks," a corruption of the surname of Frederick Walter Pendleton, the Kentish fellow who built it on the site of old stables.

War and tear on cathedral

CURRENTLY covered in scaffolding and swathed in protective plastic sheets for the repairs to its lantern tower, Blackburn Cathedral has the look of a sky-high building site. But who remembers when it looked like one for years - but with no work going on at all?

For that was the prospect when this picture of the Cathedral was taken in March, 1941, when, because of the war, a halt was called on building its extensions - for the duration.

It was a big setback to the task of transforming town's former parish church into looking like a cathedral, as it had become with the creation of the Blackburn Diocese in 1926.

Then, an appeal was immediately launched to raise money to extend the church by the addition of transepts and a chancel, but it took until 1938 for the work to commence, only for it to be virtually suspended just 18 months later.

The delay caused by the war meant that it was not until 1969 that the Cathedral extension project was - with the exception of the extreme east end and the new crypt - completed.

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