EPW013251 ENGLAND (1925). The town centre including cotton mills, Nelson, 1925

Palace Cinema on Leeds Road. We didn’t often go to the Palace Cinema as children but every Christmas they laid on a special cinema show for the children of the town. It was so exciting. We formed a long queue down the side of the cinema waiting to be let in. Can you imagine a cinema full of excited children shouting and cheering their cinema hero's?. The best bit was that at the end of the performance when we were all sent home with an apple, tangerine, sweets and a small toy and it was like Christmas had begun. I don’t know who paid for it but it was certainly appreciated.

William Street, Nelson where I spent most of my childhood. In 1946 these houses were rented from Victory V. I think it was 4 shillings a week. They were ‘two up and two down’, the kitchen had a stone slab floor and a stone sink. There was gas and electricity to the houses but some still kept an old range, fire and oven where the fireplace was. There were gas lights on the wall and I remember how fragile the mantles were.If the kitchens were updated the rent went up. There was an outside loo in the small stone slabbed yard, a ‘tippler’ which was flushed from the waste water from the kitchen. The seat was planks of wood with a hole covering a wide ceramic pipe. The other downstairs room had a wooden floor and was over the coal cellar. The door to the cellar was between the two rooms. Upstairs were two bedrooms with small fireplaces. One bedroom had a cupboard over the stairs.All windows were sash windows. The house was cold and the family huddled around the fire in the kitchen. Our legs had marks from the heat but we were still cold. The upstairs windows often had frost on the inside. The back street was narrow and cobbled and occasionally the cobbles had new gas tar put around them. It was pleasing to pop the bubbles in the new shiny gas tar. Every 5th November a bonfire was built at the end of the back street just outside No15. Eventually after some years the police said it was a danger and it stopped. The front street had a rough grassed area in front of it where we played. Eventually the boiler house for Victory V was demolished and we stopped playing there as the asbestos from it was left flying around in the air. In effect these were slum houses but it was not until 1958 they were demolished. The photo shows all that is left today, the back walls of all the yards.

Leeds-Liverpool Canal

Burnley-Colne railway line

Leeds Road

Manchester Road

Lord Nelson (Pub)

Shops, Scotland Road

Brewery now demolished

Carr Road

Every Street

Market Hall clock tower