History

Most of this site is dedicated to the so far unwritten history of the town, that is either transcriptions of original material relating to the town or new research into the people and places of the town – and these can be found under the menu headings at the top of each page.

There have been many published works about Great Harwood, and I don’t intend to ‘rewrite history’, but eventually I will add a very brief history of the town. In the meantime below are listed the books that are the main sources.

Whittaker was the first, but concerns himself mostly with the landed gentry, very little of the economy of the area is covered. Abram’s History of Blackburn Town and Parish is more comprehensive, and covers the yeoman families – there are errors though, so read with care. Farrar and Brownbill drew on Abram when they were writing the Great Harwood section of the Victoria County History.

Of the modern histories the best are Louie Pollard’s Great Harwood Gleanings and History of a Village Church, the last being more of a social history than a straightforward history of the church. Mike Rothwell’s Industrial Archaeology of Great Harwood lists the major industries of the town. These are all still in copyright, but can be borrowed from libraries in the UK or sometimes found on eBay or Abe Books.

A while ago Ian Fairclough, Cris Kydd and myself produced a booklet named Great Harwood Revisited to help to make funds to continue the maintenance of this site. We called it revisited simply because many of the topics had been covered by previous writers, but the need for photos of the town never seems to decrease so here is an online version of the book.

We were grateful to the people and organisations who gave us permission to use their material, in particular Hyndburn District Libraries.

Great Harwood Revisited

War Memorial