If I told you the building, obviously residential property, was in Stoneyholme would that help?

The second picture is a big clue as it and the first photo are directly related.

Perhaps I should admit that if someone had let me see a photo of the house in picture one, I do not think I would have been able to identify it even with the clue it was in Stoneyholme.

The photo of the church interior might have helped: a process of deduction may well have resulted in me asking if the images had anything to do with the Anglican church of St James the Great, Burnley.

If you have got that far, you know your Burnley history remarkably well. The church interior is that of Burnley's St James the Great, and I emphasise the name of our town as, although Burnley St James the Great has now gone, we still have a church of the same dedication in the borough. The parish church of St James the Great Briercliffe is also dedicated to St James, who was one of the 12 apostles, the son of Zebedee and brother of St John.

The house is the vicarage of St James the Great, Burnley. It stood, in its own grounds, in Holme Road, which was off Rectory Road. Opposite was the River Calder and beyond that was Stoneyholme recreation ground. Nearby was Cavour Street and Ashley Street and further along Holme Road was the tramway which connected Clifton Colliery to the coal yards of Oswald Street. Holme Road also led to Spring Gardens, Royle Lodge and, finally, Royal Hall, which once served as Burnley rectory attached to St Peter's.

St James's Church was one of the most interesting of Burnley's places of worship. The church stood in Bethesda Street and was built in what was called the Tudor style. It was consecrated in 1849 by Dr James Prince Lee, the first Bishop of Manchester, but the Rev. Hugh Stamer had been put in charge of the district, which ultimately became St James's Parish some years before. He held his first services in the adjacent St James's School, which had been erected in 1839.

This latter building I remember better than the church as it was there that Mr Herbert Crabtree attempted, sadly with little success, to teach me woodwork. I remember, on one occasion, receiving praise (I think it was praise) from him because of what I took to be the symmetry of the nail box I had just completed. Mind you, he could have been making fun of me as I was hardly an expert with any of the woodworking tools to which he introduced me.

St James's was in a poor district of Burnley and the Rev. Stamer must have had a difficult task to raise the £3,000 required to complete the first stage of the building.
Initially, the church was without a tower and spire. Those were added in 1868 at a further cost of £1,000, and you will have noticed the spire, a somewhat incongruous intruder in the picture which accompanied last week's article.

As you can see, the church was very pleasing internally.
Perhaps the most interesting features were the windows, although there were quite a number of other memorials in the church. The east window, which you can see in the centre of picture two, was very impressive and was a "te deum" by the well-known firm of Shrigley and Hunt. It was a memorial window, the bequest of Christopher Metcalfe, one of the founders of Metcalfe Brothers, the Burnley firm of retail grocers.

One of the interesting things about the parish of St James was that it was built for a community which ceased to exist not long after the church was completed. For example, there was once a large number of houses on the site of the old market hall and houses closer to the church were demolished in the early years of the 20th Century. In response to this, the boundaries of the parish were extended, on at least three occasions, to include the whole of the district of Stoneyholme beyond the railway on the Burnley side of the Calder.

The last of these extensions brought into the parish an empty disused mission school, formerly belonging to Burnley Parish Church. In 1922 St James's entered into legal possession of this building by the free gift of R. A. Tatton, Esq, who had succeeded to the Townley Parker of Royle Estate, and it was restored for ecclesiastical purposes under the title of St James's Church Parochial Hall.

When the church of St James the Great was closed and partial demolition took place, its site later becoming the Peace Garden, the parochial hall served as a church in its own right.

I would like to thank Mr and Mrs John and Sharon Scott for permission to use the photos in today's article.