Fleetwood Tram Sunday Festivals

A collection of articles on the cars, buses, lorries, and trams that have appeared over the years at Fleetwood's annual Festival of Transport, originally and still popularly known as Tram Sunday. This hugely popular event started in 1985 with the centenary of the Blackpool tramway and has grown into a fascinating and nostalgic day out with many on-street stalls, music and fairground rides.

Each article can be accessed by clicking or tapping the photographs below. A link at the end of each article will bring you back to this index page.

Blackpool Miscellaneous Index

Whalley St Mary and All Saints

Back in the 1980s I was writing regularly for a Lancashire-based magazine and had a series of articles called "John Burke's Curious Lancashire" that featured half a dozen or so images from around the county with a bit of text covering the sort of antiquities and rarities that most people would pass by without a thought.

This is the church of St Mary and All Saints at Whalley in the Ribble Valley. Already mentioned for its abbey ruins on these pages, Whalley also has an interesting church, built on the site of or as an enlargement of a Norman church of the 11th century which itself was built on the site of an even earlier Anglo-Saxon church mentioned in the Domesday Book. Remnants of both earlier churches stand in its churchyard and fragments that are built into its walls.

This is one of three Saxon crosses to be found in the sunshine close by the church door. You can also find them in rain, snow and fog (not as easily in fog...) but they do look better in sunshine and I was lucky on this visit!

Equally so on an earlier visit, this photograph dating from 1983 and one of several taken for the magazine work. It was rare for magazines to use colour photos in those days apart from on the cover. The Saxon crosses have lost the actual arms of the cross, but the surviving shafts have carvings placed there by stonemasons in the 10th or 11th century.

The current church was built mostly in the 13th century, the tower added in the 15th century and the south porch in 1844. Subsequent restorations and additions took place in the 1860s and in 1909. Inside, the stalls were carved in 1430 and came from the Abbey after the Dissolution. They have the name of the carver, Mr Eatough.

The octagonal chunky font of gritstone dates from the 15th century and has marks suggesting that a lock was fitted in the 16th century, quite possibly to stop the local witches from trying to steal the Holy Water. We are in Pendle country here...

Coming back out of the church I found this old stone coffin.

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Taking The Genteel Airs Of St Annes, Lancashire

Sunday 29 May 2016. It's Spring Bank Holiday weekend and we decide to have lunch out at the Beach Cafe, St Annes. It's a beautiful day. We park on a side road off the Promenade near to the Pier and walk along to the cafe which is family owned and run.

The Fylde coast does from time to time see a bit of rough weather - as witness what used to be the end of the pier standing forlornly a distance from the current end of the pier... But today the temperatures are up, the ice cream is selling fast - and melting fast - and some jaunty blue umbrella sunshades have sprung up to convince you that this is Hawaii.

St Annes is just a few miles south of Blackpool and was always a little more genteel. A half-way stop between Blackpool and Lytham. Stone designs in the bridge pathways were laid down in 1909. A little hard to see on this photograph admittedly, but a few minutes searching around this spot and you will find stone depictions of anchors and windmills and geometric designs all made out of pebbles set into the cement.

The bridges take you over the waterways and gardens. For the more adventurous there are some stepping stones over the waterway at one point. They too have been there a hundred years or more and I have some ancient cine film of myself as a baby being carried over them by my Grandad!

These gardens are still unspoilt by the change in national pasttimes and tastes from the 20th to the 21st century. The ducks can enjoy their use of the water, largely undisturbed by the shouts or chasing of children.

At the southern end of the water garden is the waterfall, with the path leading through a little grotto behind the fall. Behind the waterfall and the rockeries, topped by that luxuriant shrubbery is the Promenade.

Back to the Pier and turning inland, we come to the centre of St Annes. This looks away from the seafront along St Annes Road West. The traffic lights control the crossing of the main coast route from Blackpool to Lytham, a little further along the coast.

Whilst it is no different from any high street in that it has been affected by changing shopping habits, St Annes has reacted by enhancing the existing flower beds and garden layouts, creating new social spaces which are enjoyed by residents and visitors alike.

A sad occurrence locally was the loss of the department store J.R. Taylor. The largest independent department store in the area went into administration in December 2014 and closed its doors for the last time on 17 January 2015 when no buyer could be found. The property is currently available to rent.

Garden Street is another shopping street leading from St Annes Road West, the main street, to the entrance to Ashton Gardens. This municipal park has a bowling green, children's playground and the Pavilion Cafe.

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Blackpool South Shore Station Demolition

It always happens that the things I should photograph, things that are about to disappear, I never seem to get round to until they either are no longer there or are already smashed to bits.

As witness these photos of Blackpool's South Shore railway station, the buildings of which, when I arrived with camera in hand in March 1985 are well on the way to nothingness... I could also cite the lack of any colour photos of those stocks on wheels I featured a while ago. Long gone by the time I went looking again with some colour film in my camera.

And yet I regularly take photos of things that don't change over and over again. Take a typical town. People take photos of its grand public buildings, town halls, parks etc. Not so much the shops on the High Street. Particularly not the small shops on the High Street. But they are the things that change. They are the photos you can look back on and come over all nostalgic. Stonehenge looks pretty much the same as it did when I were a lad. The stones I mean not the now elaborate entrance and gift shop. You see? The small shops...

So I have no photos of the South Shore station before its demise. No photos of the wonderful model railway set that resided within. #fail as my Twitter friends would say.

South Shore station today is still in use as Blackpool's second terminus. Just a couple of shelters adorn the platforms. The line that comes to it splits from the main route into Blackpool North at Kirkham and stops at Lytham, St Annes and the Pleasure Beach.

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Colne's Stocks on Wheels

In March 1985 I was trundling around East Lancashire looking for a few curiosities I had read about in Arthur Mee's wonderful series of books The King's England.

Each county had its own book - and they were slightly different counties when the books were written in the 1930s. Westmorland and Cumberland, Rutland and perhaps a couple more were still to be found on a map of England. Other modern county or administrative names such as Merseyside or Greater Manchester were absent. Both Manchester and Liverpool, as well as Windermere, were to be found in Lancashire.

Anyway, I wasn't in any of those places, I was in Colne. You hardly ever hear the name on its own. It's normally the final part of a string - "Burnley, Nelson and Colne"! But Colne had something exciting to show me that day in 1985.

In the churchyard, protected by a slate roof on a timber frame, were a set of stocks mounted on a little cart on metal wheels.

There's not a lot to say about them except that I have never ever come across another set of stocks like them. They would have been dragged round to the local markets so that miscreants could be imprisoned in them for people to mock or throw things at. Stocks were therefore a less harsh punishment than the pillory where the head and hands are shackled, making it impossible to protect the face.

I went back to Colne not all that long after these were taken, hoping to take colour photos in better weather, but the stocks had disappeared. What a shame.

Hodder Bridge and the Crossing of an Army

August 1983 saw me dashing about the Lancashire countryside, avidly snapping away at anything that was falling down, had already fallen down, or had a story to tell.

At the time I had a series, John Burke's Curious Lancashire running every now and then in the bi-monthly magazine Lancashire Magazine.

This is the River Hodder, a tributary of the Ribble. The bridge has obviously seen better days but fits all of my criteria in that parts of it have fallen down, the rest of it looks (though I'm not sure it is) in imminent danger of falling down, and it most certainly has a story to tell.

Across this bridge marched an army. Not just any old army, but an army on their way to a battle. Not just any old battle, but a battle that would change the course of English history.

The army was led by Oliver Cromwell, a name that even today can divide the country. On that day in 1648 his men were on their way to Preston, where they would win a huge victory upon which hung the fate of the Civil War. Following the battle the Royalist cause collapsed. The Parliamentarians called for the King to be brought to trial and six months later he was beheaded at Westminster on such a low block that he was forced to lie prone on his stomach in humiliation.

Return to Curiosities: Bridges Index

Children's History of Lancashire

Ooh see! A new Children's History of Lancashire popped through my letterbox from Amazon today.

What am I doing buying children's books you may wonder? No it wasn't particularly for my granddaughter as she's a bit young yet! The book contains three of my photographs, so I thought it would be fun to both have a look at a copy to see how they had used them and to keep it for my own records. Most of my published photos I have as tear sheets, i.e. pages torn from magazines and newsletters or trade sheets etc. I might keep this one intact though! I imagine you'll want to rush out and buy a copy now. Check out pages 9, 10 and 11!

Sunderland Point

April 1983. We risked the tidal road over the salt marsh to Sunderland Point. It is a long disused port in Lancashire, at the mouth of the River Lune.

The dockside with its row of mooring posts stands forlornly next to the gravel bed of the edge of the river. Hard to imagine now as a thriving busy port thronged with ocean going ships unloading goods for transport to the mills of Manchester and the rest of Lancashire.

Sunderland Point was where the first cargoes of cotton came to, from America. In 1983 it had two curiosities that reminded us of those times. The "Cotton" Tree, seen above, is actually a kapok - a type of poplar - but it gained its name because it started to grow soon after the first bales of cotton were imported here and the locals thought it had grown from a seed blown from the bales. They didn't know that cotton grows on a bush rather than a tree.

Sadly, a few years after this photo was taken, the tree was damaged in a storm and died, having to be uprooted.

The second curiosity is Sambo's Grave, the grave of a negro slave left here c1736 by his master whilst he went inland on business. The legend is that the negro thought himself abandoned in this wild place amongst strangers and died of a broken heart. Another version is that he died after catching a disease from the locals that he had no immunity to. However he died, the locals refused to bury a non-Christian in the churchyard and the sailors buried him on the headland according to the Lonsdale Magazine of 1822: "...without either coffin or bier, being covered only with the clothes in which he died."

The entire place is a bit of a curiosity. It was Lancaster's first port, but the tidal nature of the road to it meant that goods could only be transported at low tide to and from the port. It was replaced by Glasson Dock in 1787 on the other side of the River Lune.

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Tithebarn Mayoral Evening

What a brilliant night we had last night! It was one of those nights where we could do no wrong!

Garstang's Tithebarn was full to the rafters (I know because I could see them!) and they were well up for a night of music and laughter.

I think David and I could have spent the night doing a comedy stand-up, but we got them singing along to our selection of country, folk and irish, fifties and sixties through to more modern songs and then after a hotpot supper, the dance floor filled!

Well alright - there wasn't a dance floor as such, but the space in front of the toilets became full of people swaying, stepping, gyrating and it wasn't because the toilets were engaged at the time!

Garstang's mayor, Gillian Lamb was pleased with the night and as the evening coincided with the official Lancashire Day we had a loyal toast to the Queen, the Duke of Lancashire.

To top the night off, as we were loading the car under a brilliantly dark sky, filled with stars, Jeannie and I saw a shooting star streak momentarily across the central sky. Well it could have been a lost spanner from the space station, but it made us both gasp and brought forth instant queries from the other two as to what we were doing...

Laying The Boggart

On the corner of a lane in a tiny place called Dilworth in Lancashire lies a huge slab of stone in the bank.

On the stone are carved the words: Ravffe:Radcliffe:laid:this:stone:to:lye:for:ever:A:D:1633: By legend Ravffe, or Ralph, used the stone to imprison a boggart, an evil spirit that haunted the lane after dark.

It is said that at some time in the following centuries the farmer at the nearby farm thought the stone could be better used in his buttery and took it from the hedge. He was plagued though by such ferocious poltergeist activity, that he changed his mind and replaced the stone in the bank where it had come from. The poltergeist activity stopped. The strange thing is... six horses were required to drag the stone downhill to the farm. Yet only one was needed to take the stone back uphill to its resting place...

The first two photographs were taken in 1990. The last time I went to look at the Written Stone, as it is known, was in 2000 Millenium year and the stone had been made into a seat - the bank of earth must have been moving and now requires a wall to keep it up, so the stone has been incorporated into it as a bench. Fancy your chances sitting on it?

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