Darwen
Darwen is a market town and civil parish in the Blackburn with Darwen borough in Lancashire, England. The residents of the town are known as "Darreners".
The A666 road passes through Darwen towards Blackburn to the north, Bolton to the south and Pendlebury where it joins the A6, about north-west of Manchester. The population of Darwen stood at 28,046 in the 2011 census. The town comprises four wards and has its own town council.
The town stands on the River Darwen, which flows from south to north and is seen in parks in the town centre and next to Sainsbury's located in the town centre.
Toponym
Darwen's name is Celtic in origin. In Sub Roman Britain it was within the Brythonic kingdom of Rheged, a successor to the Brigantes tribal territory.The Brythonic language name for oak is derw and this is etymologically linked to Derewent, an ancient spelling for the River Darwen. Despite the area becoming part of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria by the mid-8th century, its Brythonic name was never supplanted by an Old English place name.
History
The area around Darwen has been inhabited since the early Bronze Age, and the remains of a round barrow from approximately 2000 BCE have been partially restored at the Ashleigh Barrow in Whitehall. The barrow had ten interments, nine of which were Collared Urn burials. As well as human remains, items found at the barrow included a bronze dagger some 7.5 inches in length, a flint thumb scraper, a sub-plano-convex knife and a clay bead. Copies of the Collared Urns may be seen at the Darwen Library.The Romans once had a force in Lancashire, and a Roman road is visible on the Ordnance Survey map of the area. Medieval Darwen was tiny and little or nothing survives. One of the earliest remaining buildings is a farmhouse at Bury Fold, dated 1675. Whitehall Cottage is thought to be the oldest house in the town, and was mostly built in the 17th and 18th centuries but contains a chimney piece dated 1557.
Like many towns in Lancashire, Darwen was a centre for textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution. Samuel Crompton, inventor of the spinning mule, lived there for part of his life. Rail links and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal arrived in the mid-19th century. The most important textile building in Darwen is India Mill, built by Eccles Shorrock & Company. The company was ruined, however, by the effects of the Lancashire Cotton Famine of the 1860s. Cotton manufacture was an important industry, and by 1907, the Darwen Weavers', Winders' and Warpers' Association had more than 8,000 members in the town.
In the early 1840s Eccles Shorrock created a large mill lodge in what is now the lower part of Bold Venture Park by constructing a dam where Inverness Road now runs across the valley cut by Bold Venture Brook. In 1848, during a night of heavy thunder storms and torrential rain, water rushed down from the moors and the dam failed catastrophically. The water level dropped by 40ft almost instantly, and a wall of water swept down into the town centre, doing considerable damage and drowning a number of poor people who slept in cellars under shops and houses in the Market Street area.
Much of the town was built between about 1850 and 1900; placenames, date stones in terraces, and the vernacular architecture of cellars, local stone, locally made brick, pipework and tiles and leaded glass, the last now mostly gone, reflect this. It was one of the first places in the world to have steam trams.
File:Gandhi at Darwen.jpg|thumb|left|Mahatma Gandhi in Darwen, 26 September 1931 with Mirabehn.
Andrew Carnegie financed a public library here; the town also had an art and technology college and a grammar school.
In 1931, Darwen was visited by Mahatma Gandhi, he had accepted the invitation from Corder Catchpool, Quaker manager of the Spring Vale Garden Village Ltd, to see the effects of India's boycott of cotton goods.
India Mill is now home to many companies, including Brookhouse and Capita Group, which runs TV licensing. Since the 1950s, the textile industry has strongly declined in the region, although many industrial buildings from the period survive, now used for other purposes. India Mill and its chimney have been sold in a £12 million deal.
Among Darwen's other notable industries are Crown Paints, formerly Walpamur Paints, the earliest British paint manufacturer, which named one of its paints 'Darwen Satin Finish'. Crown Wallpaper manufactured wallpaper, Lincrusta and Anaglypta in the town. ICI Acrylics was where acrylic glass was invented; it is still manufactured in two separate plants within the town. Spitfire canopies and coloured polythene washing-up bowls were first made here. A opened in 2016
Governance
The municipal borough of Darwen existed for ninety-six years, from 1878. The borough was merged with Blackburn in 1974 under the Local Government Act 1972. The town became part of the Lancashire non-metropolitan district of Blackburn, which was renamed Blackburn with Darwen in 1997, shortly before it became a unitary authority.The population of the town declined from 40,000 in the 1911 census to 30,000 in the 1971 census.
Locally, Darwen has been represented by Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors in the main council wards for the town. In the 2008 local elections, the For Darwen Party picked up the majority of the wards in the town to put pressure on Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council for Darwen to have its own council again. In April 2009 Darwen Town Council was formed.
There are five council wards within Darwen out of the 23 in the Borough of Blackburn with Darwen. These are:
- Earcroft
- Marsh House
- Sudell
- Sunnyhurst
- Whitehall
Coat of arms
The coat of arms for Darwen should not be confused with the coat of arms used by the unitary authority of Blackburn with Darwen, which is the coat of arms for Blackburn.Darwen was granted its coat of arms on 7 August 1878. At the foot of the coat of arms is the town motto in Latin Absque Labore Nihil, which translates as "Nothing without labour". The arms depicts three cotton bolls and the River Darwen which runs through the town. The cotton represents the cotton industry in which the town grew and prospered during the Industrial Revolution and the three bolls to represent the three main areas of Darwen – Over Darwen, Lower Darwen and Hoddlesden. At the helm of the coat of arms is a barred helmet representing nobility, and above it the torse in the town colours of blue and gold. At the crest a man stands shouldering a pickaxe, which refers to the town's motto and also represents the mining industry that was present to the east of the town at that time.
Education
After the passing of the Education Act 1870, many schools were established to serve the ever-growing population. Many were later demolished.Darwen Aldridge Community Academy opened in September 2008 at the premises of the former Darwen Moorland High School on the outskirts of the town, which had closed in July 2008 to reopen as the academy after the summer holidays. All pupils from Darwen Moorland transferred to the academy. Pupils have subsequently moved down to the new site, into a state-of-the-art £49m academy, with sixth form and modern facilities.
Darwen Vale High School was temporarily moved to the old Moorland site whilst a new build was completed on the original site. The original school façade was incorporated into the new build, and Darwen Vale transferred back to the original site in 2012. However, the move had caused major issues with the management at the school, which led to the head leaving and a new head taking over in 2013. Later in 2013, Ofsted ruled that the school was failing and the government ordered the school's conversion to academy status, sponsored by the Aldridge Foundation, despite teaching staff and parents protesting governmental imposition on the school's management.
In September 2013 Darwen Aldridge Enterprise Studio opened and in 2014 the school moved to its permanent home in the renovated former Model Lodging House on Police Street.
In January 2022 Crosshill School completed a £2million move from Blackburn Central High School to the vacant Sunnyhurst Centre on Salisbury Road, with the move adding extra places at the school, Crosshill is part of the Champion Education Trust.
Geography
Location
Darwen is located amid the West Pennine Moors south of Blackburn, it stands within a valley with the River Darwen flowing at its base. The river passes through the town from south to north, subsequently joining the River Ribble, which flows into the Irish Sea between Lytham St Annes and Southport. The A666 road follows the valley through the town centre as part of its route from the Ribble Valley, north of Blackburn, to Bolton and the boundary between Pendlebury and Irlams o' th' Height in Salford. The town's weather conditions made it perfect for cotton weaving and as a result it became one of the largest mill towns in Lancashire.The Guinness Book of Records records that Darwen had one of the largest flash floods in the United Kingdom, in 1848; 12 people died. See 'History' above.
Landmarks
Darwen Jubilee Tower
In 1897 the town council met to deliberate how best to celebrate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. The idea of building the Jubilee Tower, in conjunction with public access to the moors, was put forward. A competition to design the tower was won by Ralph Ellison from the borough engineer's department and on 22 June 1897 work began. On 24 September 1898 the opening ceremony was held, attended by over 3,000 people. Present at the ceremony were Councillor Alexander Carus, Mayor Charles Huntington, the High Sheriff of Lancashire and Lord of the Manor Rev. W.A. Duckworth.The tower, which is open to the public, overlooks the town from the moors and stands at an altitude of 1,227 ft and has a height of 85 ft. A spiral staircase leads to the top from where, on a clear day, Blackpool Tower, the Isle of Man, North Wales and the Furness Peninsula can be seen. In November 2010 the dome of the tower was blown off by strong winds. The dome was restored in January 2012.