One of Blackburn’s finest buildings will be given a new lease of life when it opens up as a public house, the purpose for which it was originally built.

This impressive building at the crossroads of Northgate and Blakey Moor, first opened as a pub in 1897.  It has had various names over the years.  Originally opened as the Ribblesdale Hotel, it reputedly owned Blackburn’s largest pub sign.  It was renamed Gladstone’s when Blackburn’s statue of Britain’s former Prime Minister was moved to a plinth right outside the pub.  Old William Ewart still stands there to this very day.  He has been climbed on many occasion since being unveiled, most notably when Rovers won the FA Cup in 1928.  He was bedecked in a blue and white scarf and had a beer bottle placed in his outstretched hand to celebrate.  Ironically, Gladstone’s statue isn’t listed, but an old red GPO telephone box beside the pub is.

This pub was later renamed Baroque.  It seemed to be a trend back then, where the word ‘Bar’ prefixed many pubs, including a few in Blackburn.  Various nicknames were also inappropriately used with Bar for some of these pubs, including Fly, Stool and Steward.  As Baroque this place didn’t seem to last very long.  There were lots of complaints from nearby businesses, especially toy shops, about them having strippers strutting their stuff at teatimes.  Then a man climbing onto its roof with a meat cleaver probably didn’t help matters either.  And so this pub became empty for a long time.

Now the only strippers in here are working on its inside walls.  Restoration of this pub is part of the £3.8M Blakey Moor Townscape Heritage Initiative.  A project jointly funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and our local council.  It seeks to regenerate this historic area of Blackburn town centre and entice people to visit our town’s beating heart.

This building’s new tenant will be near neighbour Shh Bar.  It will move from its premises across the road on Northgate and relocate to a newly refurbished pub premises.  It will continue to keep its present name.  Opened in 2017, Shh has brought a refreshing change to Blackburn town centre’s pub culture.  ‘Ambience’ is a word often used to describe Shh Bar’s atmosphere.  Hopefully this will be transferred across to their new building when they move in.  Much interest and anticipation has been generated already by this proposed relocation.

Some good news is Blackburn’s Brown Cow pub on Livesey Branch Road reopening.  But it seems to have caused controversy amongst locals after this pub’s parent group said their hostelry was based in Blackburn’s Feniscowles district and not the Livesey part of town.

This pub is owned by Stonegate Group, which is one of Britain’s largest pub chains.  Their head office is in Solihull, but they are registered in the Cayman Islands.  Stonegate is owned by venture capitalists TDR Capital who are based in London.  TDR also own 50% of EG Group, in partnership with Blackburn’s Issa Brothers.  They are also in the same consortium, along with the Issa’s, which recently bought control of ASDA.

As regards Blackburn’s Brown Cow, Stonegate are calling it a Craft Union pub.  This sounds like music to the ears of us die-hard trade union members.  But an image of skilled electricians, plumbers and engineers working behind the Brown Cow’s bar is a bit fanciful.  It’s debatable whether Stonegate even recognises trade unions in this industry.  They certainly didn’t have any dealings with the cartographer’s union when they decided their pub’s address was in Feniscowles.

Harking back to a previous identity problem following boundary changes in 1974.  Cherry Tree and Feniscowles, which came under the old Chorley Rural District, became part of Blackburn.  Unfortunately this resulted in Livesey Branch Road having houses along it with the same door numbers as a legacy of this road originally being in two separate boroughs.

Perhaps there could be an answer to this mystery of why the Brown Cow has been placed in Feniscowles after all.  This may be down to Feniscowles actually having a cow in its name – immediately after Fenis.  No doubt Stonegate are glad our town is Blackburn and not Scunthorpe.  This latter town gave rise to the ‘Scunthorpe Problem’ of 1996 which AOL’s profanity filter prevented residents from this Lincolnshire town creating accounts with them due to a substring containing an obscene word.  Something similar also happened to Google’s SafeSearch filter with the same town.

On the bright side, at least we can breathe a sigh of relief that we could never suffer any confusion with Blackburn’s other Feniscowles pub at the top end of Livesey Branch Road – the Feildens Arms.  This is down to it not having an apostrophe like its namesake a few miles due north in Mellor Brook.  What a handy solution!

One of Blackburn town centre’s closed pubs may be turned into a heritage project.  This scheme could regenerate its building by transforming it into a pub museum.

The Fleece on Penny Street has been closed for many years and its previous owner, Thwaites Brewery, would probably have liked to have seen it demolished.  But our local council, in partnership with Maple Grove Developments, plans to buy Thwaites’ old brewery site.  This includes the Fleece and former Waterloo/Daniel’s pub, currently being used by the Bureau of Blackburn, following the fire where they were based at St John’s church.

This pub, at one time known as the Golden Fleece, was used as a lock-up many years ago.  These were various town centre pubs with secure cellars where drunks and vagabonds could be banged up overnight and dealt with next day.  John Hall, a 19^th century landlord of this pub, charged one shilling to lock drunks up during the day.  His night time rate was 1s 6d.  But the Fleece has since hosted many a voluntary lock-in since its days as a drunkard’s prison.

Our problem in Blackburn is pubs are disappearing at an alarming rate.  This follows a similar situation with our old textile mills and factories.  Blackburn’s skyline used to be thronged with mill chimneys, but now they are noticeable by their absence and have become quite a rarity.  While not being an aesthetically pretty sight, they are still a huge part of our history and heritage as a cotton weaving town.  Now there is a movement to make sure our old mill chimneys are preserved wherever possible.

Preserving our old pubs could also be a once in a lifetime opportunity to save another aspect of Blackburn’s working class culture and heritage.  Sometimes people forget our town was known as an important brewing centre.  Many people think this seems to be the case with some brewers which used to be based here and now want to see themselves in a more gentrified and rustic way than they were known for previously.  But it should always be remembered:  You can take the brewery out of Blackburn, but you can’t take Blackburn out of the brewery.  Sadly, time has proven you can take pubs out of Blackburn, mostly never to return.

This idea of a pub museum actually originated in one of Blackburn’s pubs.  What makes it different from all those other beer-sodden hare-brained schemes, which often come up in pubs, is this one is no pipe dream and might make it to the next rung.  After all, along with the Fleece, we have plenty of premises available for such a project.