The Hesketh family have been associated with Rufford Old Hall since the time of it first being built. However, they owned the land there for many decades before. The Heskeths received their estate …
From the top of chilly Winter Hill to the beautiful coastline around Arnside, we bring you some of the best walks to enjoy this Spring.
E.O. Hoppé, The Canal, Manchester, Lancashire, 1925
Explore the artists and artworks of our time at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
PARISHIONERS at a Helmshore church face a desperate bid to raise £80,000 for repairs to the bell tower. The tower at St Thomas’s Church, in Helmshore Road, is currently closed because of problems with damp. As a result the church has had to stop ringing the bells, and the clock has stopped working because of the damp conditions. LET 300910
THE photographer who took this gallery of pictures as a teenager for a school competition in 1975 is now looking for the people in them.
An old postcard image but great as it shows the town's municipal buses just prior to the takeover by Selnec Buses when the cream and blue would be replaced by a very '70s orange and white livery. The double-deck bus is on route 17 to Manchester Cannon St. The shot is most likely taken from the old Wellington Hotel and is looking across the river bridge that forms The Esplanade towards the banks, Burton's the tailors and the town offices of Rochdale Corporation Transport. Two signs - to taxis and the BR station, appear on the lamp post that carries a 'standard' Rochdale streetlamp made by Wardle Electrics. One of the decorative 'hoop' lamps has been replaced by another Wardle lantern - the long Aureole. In the background - the tower blocks built in the 1960s (Cyril's Sore Fingers as we knew them after Cyril Smith the borough's famous mayor and MP) - and the gable end of the old Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society - acknowledged as the world's first Co-Operative Society. Oddly I don't recall them having the word 'Co-op" in their title - and for many years Rochdale had two main societies, the Pioneers and the Provident Co-op Society.
Celebrate the historic waterways of Lancashire with one of these canalside walks that allow you to enjoy the countryside and witness...
Architect: Bradshaw & Gass
On Friday 12th December 1969 I was up at 4:20am and, by 4:40, was waiting at the bus stop at the top of our road in Staple Hill, Bristol. I had a train to catch. My intended destination was St Helens in Lancashire. Why St Helens? Difficult to explain ...and I don't altogether understand the psychopathology myself. All I know is that ever since I had been old enough to see and feel I had loved fog, moist hazy light, shiny pavements after rain, soot, gloom and chimney-smoke. Photographs of collieries, factory chimneys, slag heaps and lines of terraced houses in gas-lit flagstoned streets fascinated me. I found all these things sublimely beautiful. How or why I could not and cannot tell, but I'm sure it had something to do with inadequacy and self-pity. Others seemed not to like this sort of thing. It was very much a minority taste. I had also seen the films of the early 60s "kitchen sink" school, with their lovingly photographed backdrops of Stockport Viaduct or the Manchester Ship Canal. I was immediately in love. I looked to the industrial regions of the north as a devout catholic looks to Rome ...as a kind of spiritual home, the repository of his allegiances. I had been three times to the north during the previous year, in an angst-fuelled "race against time" to see Britain's last steam locomotives. Looking down from the train over the rain-washed slate roofs of Longsight, I knew what I would be doing once all the steam engines had gone. So St Helens it was. I had arranged to take a week's holiday which I would spend on day trips to the north. Too shy to stay in a hotel on my own, I returned to my own bed at the conclusion of each outing. In those days I was earning about £7 per week and holiday entitlement was two weeks per annum. I had chosen December as the time of year most likely to produce the light I liked. The whole week was a great success and there has always been a little corner of the Bentos soul where an eternal flame burns to its memory. I was 19, which helped. All experience is heightened ...I suppose hormonally... in a way which never again returns. Here we see a street corner in the town. The name plaque says Wilson Street. I had just walked, in Swinburnian ecstacies, through a drizzle-pervaded landscape of collieries, slag heaps, smoking factory chimneys and monstrous excavations. Unfortunately, the dim light I loved did not suit the camera I then owned and the photographs I took were mostly of abysmal quality. This view now meets its destiny as a scanned negative, properly visible for the first time. The largish windows suggest that the corner houses might once have been shops.
As seen from the lower edges of the Saddle fells near chipping in Lancashire, England.
See vintage images of scenes from around the world, and buy prints from National Geographic.
It's the most Easter-y place in Britain, says Tom Dyckhoff, where evil winter sprites are beaten off by The Coconutters
Author and broadcaster Tony Francis gives an outsider’s view of this unique community
