My Lancashire - My accounts of the local area

THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS 1862 When writing a previous post, about the history of horse racing around the Preston area, I had been looking for pictorial evidence.  This was always likely to be in the form of illustrations.  Whilst photography had been invented, as I understand it, as far back as 1822.  However, photographs would be used in publications, such as newspapers, until the 1890s.  When researching Penwortham Holme, I was led to a picture of an agricultural show that took place as part of the Preston Guild in 1862.  This in turn led me to a full piece about the occasion in the 'Illustrated London News' from that era.   The Illustrated London News was founded by Herbert Ingram and first published on Saturday 14th May 1842.  It was the world's first illustrated weekly news magazine.  It was published weekly for most of its existence.  However, it switched to a less frequent publication schedule in 1971, and eventually ceased publication in 2003.  The company contin

  The Remains of Preston's Third Town Hall A journey to Howick Cross In January 2023, on a pleasant but very cold day, I went for a walk along the Ribble Way on the section from Penwortham Holme towards the western end of the route that ultimately ends at the Dolphin Inn pub in the marshes of Longton village. The river has a lot of reinforcement around that area, I presume to help prevent erosion.  This includes rubble that I think came from the old Penwortham Power Station and a section of more formal gabions (wire mesh crates with rubble inside them stack upon each other like bricks) to protect the feet of the electricity pylons that take the high tension cable across the River Ribble.  The remains mainly consist of reinforced concrete sections and red brick as you first leave Holme Road toward the marshes.  This led me to speculate that it was from a relatively modern structure.  A View of Preston from Howick Cross However, when I reach the point where Mill Brook flows into the

Fall Of Thirteen Arches,  of the Ribble Viaduct on the Preston Extension of the East Lancashire Railway. Following on from my post about the Hidden Viaduct near Preston, once know as "The Blue Bridge", I put the old picture looking from Miller Park and my photograph of the top of a buried arch on a local social media group.  That solicited a comment from a group member that pointed towards an old news article. Hidden Viaduct near Preston, once know as "The Blue Bridge" This news article revealed that there had been problems with the arches during the construction, and this actually led to thirteen of them collapsing.  It was entitled "Fall of Thirteen Arches of the Ribble Viaduct on the Preston Extension of the East Lancashire Railway".  It came from the Preston Guardian published on Saturday 27th October 1849.  I ran the scanned image of the newspaper extract through an online OCR (optical character recognition) software process and converted the image in

The Hidden Viaduct of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway The Old Railway Line On a personal level, I am familiar with the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, or at least the disused sections around Preston and South Ribble.  I used to cross a section near Bamber Bridge on may way to school in the mid nineteen-seventies, and I am sure that there were still a few goods trains pulling loads of oil tankers crossing Brownedge Road (Brownedge Lane) that occasionally stopped us if I'd gone to school on the 113 bus.  Passenger services had long since stopped and when the goods trains had also ceased, the rail company ('British Rail') quite quickly removed the infrastructure.  This was definitely the rails and sleepers, but perhaps not the ballast straight away.  From that point forward, it became the playground of a few of the local children, myself included. Brownedge Level Crossing, Bamber Bridge around 1905 At that point, we often would have adventures in the remains of Todd Lan

Doctor Syntax A Pub named after a horse that was named after a cartoon character Penwortham Holme is an area that many local people will associate with recreation, whether it be football or horticulture. However, in earlier times, there was a completely different form of entertainment happening. Penwortham Holme Pavilion The following is some history relating to Horse Racing that took place on Penwortham Holme before the new bridge, built in 1912, effectively cut the area in half. The 1912 bridge was built because the earlier bridge further upstream, built in 1759, could no longer cope with the volume of traffic. The River Ribble in this area is very different now, compared to how it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some of the changes were related to the creation of Preston Docks in 1892. However, at that point there was still an island formed by a narrow water course that was once a larger channel of the River Ribble. The area Penwortham Holme gets its name fro