My Lancashire - My accounts of the local area

The Sculptures of Thompson Dagnall from Liverpool  Thompson Dagnall is a British sculptor. He was born in Liverpool in 1956, and he attended Liverpool and Brighton Polytechnics before gaining an MA at Chelsea College in 1979. I first became aware of him because he worked on quite a lot of commissions in the Preston area.  It wasn't the first of  Thompson's work that I had seen, but the Crow's Nest at Lea was the first one I identified has being attributed to him.  Later, I identified other works in the area.  " Crows-Nest " The 'Crows-Nest', by Sculptor Thompson Dagnall was created in 2006 from oak and steel. It was made for the waterways trust and is positioned on Savick Brook near the end of the Ribble Link. This is intended to be a literal interpretation of the crow’s-nest on a ship atop the mast, a link between the inland waterways and the anticipation of the open sea, leading the mind out beyond the link on a maritime adventure. Dagnall wanted to giv...

The New Railway Hotel in Preston Became The Park Hotel The New Railway Hotel in Preston - The Park Hotel RAILWAY HOTEL, PRESTON - This hotel will afford an eligible opportunity for breaking a tedious railway ride, situate as it is about midway between London and Edinburgh. The building has been erected under the superintendence of Mr J B Stanley of Euston, London, the contractors being Messrs R Neill and Son of this city [ Manchester ]. The design has been to secure ready access to the station, simplicity of internal arrangement combined with picturesqueness of exterior, at a reasonable cost. The primary estimated cost was between £29,000 and £33,000. The style is ornamental. The material used is red Ruabon bricks, with Crosshill stone strings and dressings and ornamental tiles forming panels under the windows. The frontage to the south is 174 feet and to the west 152 feet. There is a coffee room on the ground floor 42 feet 6 inches by 28 feet; a drawing room, 23 feet 9 inches by 26 fe...

Fire at The Singleton Row Windmill on Harrison Hill in Preston ALARMING FIRE . About a quarter to twelve o'clock on Monday night, an alarm was given at the fire-brigade station that the wind corn mill in Singleton-row, Harrison-hill, in the occupation of Mr. Henry Walker, was on fire. A full complement of men were soon got together, and hastened to the mill with one engine, and on their arrival found the flames issuing from the doors and windows of the two lower storeys, and also from the door communicating with the stage that surrounds the mill at the third storey. It was at once seen that one engine would not be sufficient to subdue the fire, and another was immediately sent for. The lower part of the mill had the appearance of an immense furnace, and the heat and smoke utterly forbade any attempt to extinguish the fire from below. The men accordingly spliced some ladders together, and laid them from the roof of an adjacent low building to stage of the mill, and by crossing the b...

Meltdown...! This is a repeat of a Facebook post from about two years ago.  At the time, I wasn't entirely sure how we'd come to have two replica cannons in Avenham Park, Preston, and not the real things.  It turned out the real ones had disappeared, but earlier than I was thinking... I am frequently flabbergasted by the flagrant disregard for history, and it’s often around this town (Preston in Lancashire).  The coming and going of the Obelisk that's not an obelisk, the disappearance of the Canal Basin and the infamous Town Hall, to name but a few.  As is often the case, I stumbled across one of my own photos when looking for something else, and I thought that I would try to find out any relevant information about it. The subject of the photograph was one of a pair of replica Sevastopol (Sebastopol) cannons modelled on those used in the Crimean War, which can be seen in Avenham park.  I think, that I have always known that they were replicas.  However, I a...

John Whitehead and Co. Syke-street, Preston Our Local Industries. No. 18. Published in the Preston Chronicle in November 1884, this article forms part of the newspaper's "Our Local Industries" series, which highlighted the leading manufacturers and businesses of the town. It provides a fascinating contemporary tour of the Albert Works in Syke Street, home of John Whitehead & Co., one of Britain's foremost makers of machinery for the brick, tile and sanitary pipe industries. As well as describing the workshops, foundry and machine shops in remarkable detail, the article reflects the pride Victorians took in engineering achievement, export success and industrial innovation. Like many nineteenth-century newspaper features, it also contains a generous measure of promotional enthusiasm, but it remains an invaluable snapshot of a Preston engineering firm whose machines were being exported throughout the world. ~ OUR LOCAL INDUSTRIES. MESSRS. JOHN. WHITEHEAD AND CO. BRIC...