William Titley
Why I live Here/Extra Info.
'WE'by William Titley
The complete text from the book: Why I live here.
Our father was working on a ship and in those days, there was a requirement for people to come down here to Lancashire to work in the cotton mills. Our father came to work in the cotton mills and a couple of years later, he brought our family. He also had a spell in the army for twenty two years and we were born abroad in Germany.
We always had a craving to come back and settle in Lancashire, which we did as soon as we reached our adult years. It was a very important stage in our lives, when we moved back into the Hyndburn area. It was like going back to our roots really. Our family are also very important, especially our sisters.
One very cold morning in February, we were sat on a car park in Rochdale and we thought lets go spend the night at mums in Hyndburn. Our grandma and granddad still live locally so we wanted to move back here to be nearer to our family. It was cheaper than living near our mum’s parents who lived in Windsor.
Forty seven years ago, we met our partners down in the Ritz in Hyndburn and we got married on the 2nd December, 1960. We had ten days on the west coast, that’s back when people described Blackpool as being the West Coast, that’s where we went for our honeymoon. We’re married now; we have two teenage daughters and two cats, that’s us.
Before that, we lived just down the road, in Johns’ mums’ house. Our grandfather, who is originally from Punjabi in India, went to East Africa to build the railways in 1896 or something, so that’s where he ended up.
We started off just literally two streets away from here, just down by where the gym is now. Then we moved to the other side of town and now we live by the hospital. It’s an area where we’ve always lived, our family have always lived locally too. Our mum worked locally in a mill. Our granddad worked here, in the globe centre when it was an engineering firm, so we’ve kept it all in house. All our family are within 10 miles of here. We’re all very close and now as we say, we’ve moved to the other side of the hill, but not very far away. We’ve really only moved a few hundred yards in all our lives.
We didn’t have the security of employment and so we couldn’t afford a big mortgage. We ended up settling here, where it was cheaper to live. Initially, it was very upsetting because moving from one place to another means meeting new people with very different accents. We struggled to understand people and vice versa, they were struggling to understand us because we had southern accents.
We had a cousin in South Hull, who put us up for about ten months. Our mum and six of our brothers and sisters, we all came, our father joined us soon after. He applied for a couple of jobs, he was a civil engineer and he applied for one at Hyndburn Borough Council. He had a friend in Clitheroe, who had been to Uganda and he got the job offer and with the job offer, came a council house, so we moved to Hyndburn. The main motivation was to be where we felt he wanted us to be and so Hyndburn became our new home.
We like it because it’s close knit although; some people don’t like it because of that reason. We live here because our parents live here.
As far as we’re concerned, we’re not ones that look over the hill and think its greener over there. We’ve been around the world. We’ve been to New Zealand; we’ve travelled quite a bit. We’ve had some good holidays but we’re most glad to get home. Our bed and a few pints of good beer, that’s what we’re happy with. We play squash three times a week, we have good lives. We do have good lives, we don’t want for anymore. We have four kids, what else do we need? We’ve got grandkids, what else is there? There isn’t anything, we’re happy. This town has done good by us.
The opportunity is there as we head up to retirement age. We sometimes wonder where would we like to be, what would we like to do? We think about all these things: moving abroad and all that but our family and friends are here. Unless we could take them all with us, we don’t think we would move and as we don’t have the money to take them all with us, we’re staying put. We may have considered moving at some point but when we had our son, we were committed to living here.
We’re the eldest of four. We are now seventy four years of age, so that makes us very old. We moved around all over England in terms of career and job prospects. As children, we can remember moving to Lincolnshire for three years, which was totally different. It was countryside. We lived in a little village and when we eventually moved back to Hyndburn, it was a bit of a culture shock because it seemed a lot bigger than the place we’d been living in.
We’ve spent most of our lives in Hyndburn and now we’re studying at Blackburn College. We hope to be going on to universities later on this year. A while ago, there weren’t many jobs back here, so we ended up going to London for a couple of years. Another time, we were living down in Chadderton, between Oldham and Manchester. We looked for jobs and saw some vacancies up here in Hyndburn for a company making cable and wiring systems for cars and other vehicles. They wanted finance managers so we applied and got the jobs.
We feel we belong here. All our friends are here, our family is here and that’s probably why we stayed. We got jobs here, which we enjoyed. We worked for the fire service for ten years, we really enjoyed that. We also came to college in Hyndburn and came down to use the sports facilities at the centre. When jobs came up, we applied for them because we knew quite a bit about the centre and its’ facilities.
There were some good jobs going in Manchester another time, doing very similar things. But if we balance up what we’ve got, working here in East Lancashire and the travelling time and really, the extra money we're offered for working in a city probably doesn’t make it all that worthwhile, especially when we consider the travelling we're not getting paid for, so that’s what kept us in Hyndburn.
The fact is, every time a shop opens, it doesn’t give us another £10 to go and spend at that shop. It doesn’t but that’s the way it is, so therefore we’ve to try and get on. In the fish market, there were five big stores and it employed sixteen blokes, full-time. There are only us and these two blokes next door now, that’s it. So we know we’ve to compete, but if we go, that’s going to be the end of it and not much else.
We once got jobs working with Chemicals, just over the trees there; it’s probably about three hundred yards away, near the Coppice. We used to go running and walking up there with our dog.
Our great, great grandma needed a bigger house because she had about thirteen children, so she moved to Hyndburn because we had really big mill houses with four floors. The first three generations lived in that house. Our great grandma did, then our grandma moved out and our mum moved in. We bought the house next door to my mum and dads twenty odd years ago for £1250, which was a fortune back then and our sister moved into mum and dad’s house. So that house has been in the family for forty seven years. We bought very cheap housing but now, young people are struggling to buy houses.
We have two children now, they’re grown up and they are thirty seven and thirty four. The house was big enough for us to bring them up in but small enough for us to run and it’s been a good family home for us.
We’ve had to do loads; we’ve had to do everything really to this house. There was no gas or central heating. That’s a new fireplace we’ve put in: new gas central heating, new fire and surround. We’re going to put a conservatory on, we’re knocking the kitchen to pieces, we’re just in the middle of doing a loft conversion and we’ve just nearly finished that. Everything that we can think of has been done in this house. We are still not straight, nowhere near, come again next year and we still won’t be anywhere near.
Further up on Blackburn road, they’ve knocked all the houses down. At the moment, we are not really sure what we're doing in the bottom bit where we are (west Hyndburn we think). We’re not a hundred percent sure whether we’re knocking it down. We’ve put it on hold for two years apparently. So we will probably have to move anyway, eventually. Our first instinct was to run home and then we thought, hang on a minute we’re not in a state to make any sort of decision here, so don’t make any decisions just yet. We think that was one of the better decisions that we made.
We’re now looking forward to going to Manchester University because there are a lot of people from different backgrounds over there. In 1980, our father decided to go back home to India. We had the opportunity to go with our family but we didn’t go because we were doing apprenticeships in engineering. We thought that was a good opportunity for us to stay, we were just one year away from our full apprenticeships and we wanted to finish them. We did consider moving away but there was also the price issue. We couldn’t actually afford to buy a bigger property, so we stayed in this property and extended with a loft conversion. We’ve now got extra space and an extra room, so rather than a two bedroom house it becomes a three bedroom house.
It’s very difficult to compare with other towns because we’ve lived all our lives within this particular area. The thing which is the most pulling part of living in this area is the fact we have friends and relatives close by. We would be reluctant to leave the area because it would mean saying goodbye to a lot of friends, who we would probably never see again. We think there’s probably a lot of prettier places to live and nicer places in the country and certainly in the world but it’s a place we’ve got attached to, we like the people and we’re quite happy to live here.
There was another opportunity to leave when our step dad wanted us to go and live in London because that’s where he lived. We weren’t keen on that and we did kick up quite a fuss, we were just not willing to leave. There were various things that made us not want to leave. First of all, we love the north. We love the area that we live in and we love the people. We’re the salt of the earth and very polite, caring, totally different to people we might find elsewhere. We didn’t end up going. We could not leave our families or the support network that we’ve got. We don’t think we will leave because we know a lot of people around here, the community is really good. We might be going to universities and so we might leave for a bit but another option is to just travel to universities and stay in Hyndburn: commuting to and from Manchester, every now and then.
Early on this year, we went to London. We felt so isolated and so alone, even just being away for a few days. When we travelled back on the train to Hyndburn and arrived back at the bottom of our street, we thought ‘This Is Home, this is just where home is… where the heart is’. An extremely busy city, ten million people might live there but it can be very lonely. We didn't get the same atmosphere from our neighbours. It's not like it is up here. People down there are not directly unfriendly but are very choosy who they will talk to and it’s not the same camaraderie as we get in this area.
We did contemplate recently whether or not to move to Gisburn to live in a static caravan. Just to have the freedom of reduced financial responsibilities and maybe travel a bit. We decided not to do it, mainly because we just didn’t want to leave the family. We now have an opportunity to move to Ribchester but because the children are settled in a school in Hyndburn, we’ll be staying in Hyndburn. We were looking to move away but every time we came back we saw the sunsets. Plus, we’re only five minutes away from the centre.
After we got married, we thought about emigrating to Australia, on the £10 ‘assisted passage’ scheme. At that time back in 1972 they were literally crying out for tradesman such as plumbers, joiners, electricians, brick layers and clerical workers. We (being typists and joiners), were prime candidates, so we were accepted for this pass to go to Australia for just £10. Anyway we didn’t go; we bought a business instead and ended up having children. We’ve no regrets at all, it’s worked out fine that we’re not there and we’re here in Hyndburn.
We thought we could easily move out and live on our own. We’ve never done anything like that before. Can you imagine? We’d have no friends, no family and we didn’t know the area at all, it was just really, really stupid. We have thought about leaving, but our family’s here. If they agreed to come with us we would go, but obviously we wouldn’t leave them. That’s our son and our grandchildren, we wouldn’t leave them. All our family have lived here, us and our four brothers, but one has since moved down south, the other three still live in and around Hyndburn.
We remember once moving to Norwich because of our mother’s job and our dad was already ill by that time. We liked Norwich a lot; it was a beautiful place to live. There were lots of strengths about it but as it worked out, our second sister moved back up here, then our younger sister moved back and then in the end we did as well. So we all came back up here and then our mum came to live with us when we got this house, it brought us all back. We love it. Today, it’s quite a busy road but back then we had a completely open field and views from Darwin Tower to the top of Great Harwood, so we’d sunsets to die for to be honest.
We love the scenery. We’re complete country girls, just loads of fields, animals and little parks, that’s what we love and there are little forests everywhere. We go through a load of pens that we can rent and put our own sheep in. Just up from there, are rivers and forests and ally ways. It’s just really, really nice and well looked after, people respect it, it’s not littered or anything and there’s loads of wildlife.
We love being near the country, we can see the fields from the windows of our houses. We love being able to go out walking so short a distance from home. We can drive down to the concerts and theatres in Manchester and we like that, so it’s a great place to live. We like this particular part of town because we can see a lot from here. We can see right across the other side of town with the hills in the distance. If we go just a little bit further up the road, we’ve got the big park. So we’re out in the fresh air and we can see right over to the Coppice and beyond. It’s also handy because it’s on the bus route and it’s almost town centre, so we get the best of both worlds here.
We like the fact that it’s not far from the coast so we can get to the seaside and it’s not far from the countryside spots, so whichever direction we want to go, there is something interesting: something pleasant. We remember, our dad once built a cabin out in the country on some farm land and we used to go there every weekend. We spent a lot of time out in the country, which is where we get our love of wildlife from. Our mum taught us every wild flower there was to know in the countryside and we walked a lot.
The weathers not all sunshine, but we know, if we spend two weeks in Greece, we get sick of the hot weather anyway. We’ve got a lovely garden, we sit in the garden and we put the table out, we have a glass of wine, and have our meal outside, yes we do, it’s lovely, it’s a nice place to be, there are lots of worse places to be, overall it will do for us.
We can have a bird’s eye view of the area and when it’s summertime on a clear day, we may be able to see Blackpool Tower and that’s something we really love. We like to sit on top of the hill, looking at the beautiful view with the trees and the river, it’s very difficult to express. We really appreciate a good view, it’s where we live. We can see the easterly by-pass, which links the M65 with the A56. We can see cars moving and we can see Pendle Hill, the Ribble Valley and when we look closely, it looks beautiful.
We can walk in the park and we’ve got lovely views, knowing we’re not far from the town. Everything is local. There are some lovely streams running through just one hundred yards away, we could make picnic areas and everything.
We’ve lived in Cyprus, Germany, all over England and Wales and we could never see ourselves moving away from Hyndburn because there’s something that always drags us back here. We loved that when we came back to Hyndburn. We knew we could just walk to the shops and walk to the pub, it’s just great and we like that.
The area still exists where we used to play as kids and we’re talking at least forty years ago. Those places are still there, so that’s nice. It’s nostalgic to go back and find that those places are still there and that there’s not a housing estate been built on there.
We like our view from our front window: nobody will have a better view from their front window, unless maybe it’s a sea view. We were looking at some old photographs from when we came to Hyndburn, when our children were really young. Now they have their own children. Time flies by and we can see in the landscape there were mills still around and big chimneys, which we don’t see anymore. We know that’s a bit sad that they’ve gone; they were really beautiful views.
There’s no where we’ll be able to take our son to play on his new bike. We were going to take him to the park but there’s a sign (we’ve been told) that says ‘No Bikes’, so that cuts that out. We like living round here because we can go up to the Lake District and anywhere we want with the motorway system now, so its quite good. We’ve got a good airport network, we can go anywhere in the world. We’re quite happy where we are. It’s safe to go out at night even nowadays; compared to some places and the people are ok. We’ve got all different communities and we all seem to get on together, no problems.
We don’t like the weather, typical Lancashire weather: raining and damp, it can cause us all sorts of problems and like some people; we suffer from arthritis, which is very uncomfortable. We wish there was more sunshine. There are six or seven months of winter, which we tend to get. We feel it shortens our lives somewhat because of an evening; we can’t go out and do any gardening because it’s so dark, cold and grim and that’s something that we’ve got used to over the years. We’re certainly building too much these days, taking all the green space away but apart from that, there is still a lot of countryside around.
We do believe in him and the after life but that doesn’t have an influence at all on our decision to settle in a place. In the area we live, there are two places nearby and both are within walking distance from our house. We’re religious and with our faith we have no problem in practicing. We’re also involved in other activities in voluntary organisations and we keep in contact with people from different backgrounds and different colours.
We were brought up religious and when we first moved to Hyndburn, we think there must have been about two or three religious families if that, so there was no place. The closest big town to us, where there would be more religious people was Blackburn and there was no place there either. Our faith is very significant. We are born again believers. We believe that he really lived and died for us. Our faith is very important to us as people living in Hyndburn and part of the reason why we choose to stay. We want to share that good news with people in Hyndburn and we believe that he has got a purpose for our lives.
We were religious and there were very few religious people here. It is important in family life, particularly in our family; we all go to the place: the boys and their wives whenever we can. On certain days, everybody makes that extra effort to get there, because it’s a social thing as well as a religious thing. It’s also a very nice way of meeting people. It is important.
We remember growing up in Hyndburn and our dad and a couple of guys from Blackburn once got to meet some religious people. If we’re in a place where there aren’t many people with the same faith as us, when we see someone, we have a tendency to go and introduce ourselves and start making some sort of conversation. We were officiated in the place but we’ve never followed the religion and we suppose it would be fair to say that we are not religious. Where we live, is not affected in anyway, shape or form by our religious convictions.
We’re usually here everyday from 3 o’clock in the morning. We see up to 190 people a day. We aim for a 10 minute response, twenty four seven help, and daily: including weekends. We see absolutely anybody: any age, culture or religion and at any hour of the day or night. We remember growing up; we used to go to places all over the country collecting money so we could build a place for the religious community that lived in Blackburn and Hyndburn. We finally managed to get enough money to buy a disused doctors’ surgery in Blackburn (opposite the YMCA) and we had our first place there. Our dad was the first president of that religious place, we finally had a place.
We’re religious, which a lot of people think as being of a particular faith. If we say religious people they don’t know what we mean. There isn’t a place in Hyndburn but there is one in Blackburn and we belong to that, so travelling distance isn’t that difficult, its only about four or five miles away. We don’t belong to a particular place or anything like that; we find such things deeper inside ourselves than that. It wouldn’t affect our decision to stay here because wherever we went, we would take it with us anyway, its part of us and who we are.
Our faith influenced our reason for this area in the first place. We wanted to stay within the locality. At that time it didn’t matter as much because we didn’t have any kids but since then, we’ve had our kids and we’ve got to consider not just their education but their religious education, which is the place because after school we spend two hours there. In the old days when we were children, we used to go to all sorts of different places, it didn’t matter which place we belonged to. Our grandparents always took us to a place and the whole community went to it. Back then, the place had much more of a lead in community activities and bringing people together. We don’t think it’s the same now; a lot of the places have closed down.
We came to this place and saw what a fantastic place it is and the feel that it had for the community. We saw the brilliant stuff they were doing with children and at that time we had our first son and so immediately decided we wanted to live in that community. We are religious by birth really but we don’t practice that faith, if that’s the right word. We sway over to the religion because our family are all religious and when we go to the place, we really enjoy it.
It’s funny actually, we’re not regular place goers, however, we do think that a strong background and grounding never actually leaves us, it’s always there. Things come into our minds that we remember from childhood and stuff like that. We could practise our faith; there is a place at the top of the street. We are governors at the local school and whilst we don’t actually attend the place regularly, we hope that we live by the values that we know have been taught in this school. We think we can probably practise our faith by our lifestyle.
We don’t hold any strong beliefs in any faith. We’re officially religious girls and we will attend places for weddings and funerals etc, but no, we are pretty independent with our faith, and we practice that wherever we go. There are a few places around which we go to now and again to pray and if we move to Manchester, there are various places over there too. There’s a prayer room in the university, so we can have a bit of time to ourselves to do our faith and religion over there.
On a certain level, football is almost like a religion. People come every Saturday afternoon to watch Accrington Stanley and probably, say a little prayer as well with five minutes to go. We have various places in this area. We’ve also got places for other faiths to practise their religions. It gives us a sense of identity when we go to the place. The area that we live in allows us to have a sense of identity.
All we had between us was a mobile phone, our own bedroom, fridge-freezers, food and a car. We started delivering occasional food parcels to the homeless and eleven years on, here we are. Our religious ground is our faith and we’re proud of it. We believe that all people are equal and that’s how the faith manifests itself in the way that we live. We can practice our faith wherever we go, because there are places all over, even in India. We could practice anywhere but we have a great love of the place that we go to at the moment.
Living in Lancashire doesn’t stop us going because there are so many places to practice our faith. We were born and raised religious. We lapsed when we were in our twenties when we decided to get married. We’re religious so we decided that we would get married in that place so we could go to the place and have faith together. We’re religious. Born religious and have been religious all our lives. Practising our religion is really easy in Hyndburn because there are two places where we go to Friday prayers. We also go to other places regularly. In terms of our faith, it’s a really good place here, everybody knows each other.
When we were about sixteen, we used to go to a place a lot. We don’t know whether that was for us or to keep our mother quiet. We did go and we were in the youth club and we were in the choir and all that sort of thing. We were also in the scouts and we liked our scouts and we didn’t want to give either up really so we said to the scout master, we said ‘would you have any objection if we came here one week and went to the place the other week?’ He said, ‘not at all absolutely, no problem with that at all’. Then we went to the place and said the same thing to him and he said ‘no, you’re going to have to make a choice’. He said scouting is a very secular movement. Well for starters, at that time we didn’t know what secular meant. So we went home and asked, what ‘does secular mean?’ We found out it was of no connections with any religious thing at all. We thought that doesn’t make sense because scouts say ‘to better by him and the queen’ basically. We thought well, he can get stuffed because we’re going to go to scouts because if we had any religion we wanted to practice, we could do it there anyway. So that really, in a nutshell finished us off as far as religion was concerned.
The man commissioned us to vow poverty, chastity, obedience and hospitality. To wear any robes we wanted, we had brown ones before we got these blue denim ones for the summer. We could live as women hermits and the roles, they die with us when we die, so we’re one offs; we’re really quite free really. We don’t know how many members there are, but virtually all our friends and all our social life revolves around the members. We don’t mean we go to the place every day and every night but a lot of the people we socialise with are also members.
The place is just across the road, then there’s the member centre, which is a few hundred yards away. We are the secretary and the chairman, so a lot of our social life revolves around that and the members of the place, which is another reason for moving to this house, instead of somewhere further away. We sometimes work unsociable hours, mainly weekends. This is when we young people need a facility like this. We are relaxed and away from school, so we can really enjoy the activities and develop our new skills too.
We don’t like the fact that we are losing so many of our graduates and we don’t like that we are a minimum wage earning community but if we can increase the earning capacity of our people, we’ll have a better quality house and a better quality town centre. There will be people who aspire for a better education, aspire to better training, but if we haven’t got role models of people who have actually achieved through education, then our community will suffer.
The best thing about Hyndburn is that the people are very friendly. No matter who we bump into, they will always talk to us. Whether we’ve known them for two years or two minutes, we’re always good, decent folk. We love the people because we’re really down to earth. We can have a good laugh with the people and we feel the town is on the way up. The people are great. We’re like dominos: push one and we all fall over.
We love that fact that we can walk to nursery and talk to the mums and dads, because it’s such a friendly place to be. Our sister lives quite close to a city and she’s still got a community around her. It’s just that she has to make more of an effort to travel to be with people, whereas we’ve got people here on our door step. We think everyone craves to be around people because we are made as people to work together and spend time with each other.
If we think about our younger days as children growing up in the area, it was the friendliness of the people here. We were brought up in an area where there was quite a lot of poverty. Our grandparents were quite poor but they always provided and they were very proud as well. Our mum and dad were the same; they gave us an absolutely wonderful childhood. We can walk up and down the front street and say ‘Hiya’ and ‘How’s you?’ People ask about our family. We go in the shops and they’ll ask ‘Has your Donna had a baby yet?’ that’s our daughter, (she’s recently had a baby) and it’s just that feeling. Everybody just seems much more concerned about us and how we are and yes, just that feeling of being in a proper community.
When we were choosing a university, we originally chose Huddersfield. We got accepted and we got a flat. We remember it well, we were supposed to start on the Monday and we backed out on the Sunday. We just couldn’t go. We think we were just desperate to move out and be independent and all that rubbish. We actually got there and just completely panicked. We didn’t know anyone; we didn’t know anyone at all. We hadn’t been to Huddersfield before the interview, we just backed out because we didn’t want to go, so we didn’t go and then we got into University at Preston, which is much closer to home.
We think that it’s important for the community leaders in the borough to have greater expectations, to have greater vision and a genuine belief that we deserve something better. We are passionate about this area and the people that live in East Lancashire are people that are caring and kind. If we were crying in the street, a total stranger would come up to us and ask if we’re ok, they hold doors open for us.
We can be standing in a bus stop and someone we’ve never met in our lives before will strike up conversations. Now that’s normal to us because that’s Hyndburn people. That’s the way we are and we think people around this area of the country are like that. We went to London to visit our friends. We were in the habit of thanking the bus driver when we got off the bus or saying hello to somebody when we walked into a shop or saying thank you. People look at us as if we’re going to mug them if we do that in London. Round here its just normal behaviour, in fact, we don’t know about the younger generation but our generation, we almost expect it as part of our way of life. In London and a lot of places, it’s all hustle and bustle. People don’t have the time of day for each other, its quite sad really.
We think on the whole, East Lancashire is not a bad place to live at the moment. However, it’s so sad that the parks and stuff are being built on. We have an all-weather pitch where we can play football all year round but we can’t do it because it’s waterlogged. Why don’t we fix it?
In cities, things are further apart distance wise, not many things are within walking distance: the schools, local shops, just basic things. Within Hyndburn, everything is within walking distance, which is a good thing because we can just nip round the corner to the shops, which makes our lives a lot easier. We can drive now, so we can go anywhere we want: Manchester’s the favourite. In fact, we can get to Manchester quicker than we can get to Preston. It’s got a lot going for it in some ways; it’s a commuter area now.
We used to love going shopping down there and our daughters used to come from Oldham to shop in Hyndburn because they thought it was wonderful. For over ten years, it went down, down and down but it’s started to come back again, a few things are getting better. But that’s serious, it is getting better and the place is starting to look up again. There are some nice shops and we have a lovely Victorian market too.
We think there should be more investment in getting us together rather than putting separate events on. Instead of a ladies group and a pensioners group doing their own things, why not bring us both together to learn about each other. We need to start to build the community again for the young people, old people and everybody else. Closing community centres and making them more expensive is not the way forward at all, we think we should be building new community centres.
We find it sad that some areas are being demolished that could have been refurbished, rather than destroyed, which is a shame. We’ve lost a lot of history in the area if we look back. A lot of large old property mansion houses, things like that no longer exist and that’s a shame because there’s not much tangible history around anymore. Hyndburn goes back along way but there’s nothing we can look at and say, this is part of the history.
We think its good in Hyndburn. It’s better than London. We have stayed in London many times and during the summer holidays, it just gets too busy there. We prefer it here, where it’s quite. It’s not as busy as some places and yet it’s not as quiet as villages, it’s got a great balance, that’s it, yes, balance. We wish that more people would come to our area, and enjoy it, and meet the us, the people are the best thing about our area.
We think Hyndburn itself has a great history that we should be proud of. We don't like the fact that we don’t ‘talk up’ East Lancashire enough. We’ve got a tremendous history to be proud of. Our bricks were used all over the world to make various structures and certainly, most of the North West of England is built out of our brick, which came from right here, in Hyndburn.
I mean just look at the regeneration of old buildings such as the Globe Centre, where our wives work, now that’s good. Hyndburn is looking a lot better than people give it credit for.
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