Blackburn
What to see
You’ll find accounts of Blackburn tourist attractions and additional information plus shopping, eating out etc at Visit Blackburn. Specific links include:
● Blackburn Beverley
● Blackburn Cathedral
● Blackburn Heritage Trails
● Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery
● Cotton Town Image Gallery
● Hobkirks Sewing Machine Museum
Towns of Two Halves extracts:
● “When the Leeds-Liverpool Canal arrived in 1810 the local newspaper looked east as much as west. ‘There is now a direct communication between this town and Hull,’ it reported, noting that only ‘the Corsican tyrant’ stood in the way of peace and trade between Blackburn and the continent of Europe.”
● “Jenny (or Jinny) Greenteeth, according to English folklore, was a hag whose pleasure it was to lure small children (or the elderly) to a riverbank and pull them in. Duckweed is Jenny’s signature plant, for the way it closes over anything that breaks the surface.”
● “The town was such a busy centre of the cotton trade that from 1863 it had its own Cotton Exchange. This quickly became a general-purpose civic resource; in 1869 Charles Dickens is said to have given his last public reading there.”
These are taken from the Blackburn chapter of Towns of Two Halves, published in 2018. To buy a copy, email info@townsof2halves.co.uk.