Today, we publish three photos of Boot Street (though I suppose the last of these should be designated Boot Way, the name by which the remnant of the street is now known). As you can see, Boot Street was not the sort of highway which would have been the first choice of a photographer working on behalf of a postcard company. That is not to say the street was without interest but, given a choice between St James's Street, Manchester Road and Boot Street, I know which would have been, to use a modern phrase, the more marketable.

The two older pictures come from the Ken Bolton Collection. The first shows Boot Street just before it was demolished and the next while demolition was in progress. This dates these two photos to about 1960.
The third photograph was taken in 1985 intended for a calendar to be published the following year. The calendar never saw the light of day but, as we shall see, it remains of interest.

Boot Street ran from Parker Lane to Aqueduct Street though the photo shows the street from the Aqueduct Street end. At about two-thirds of its length, Boot Street was crossed by Croft Street. The first picture shows the long row of houses on the odd side of the street. These ran from 17 to 43 and, if you look carefully, you might be able to see the old St Peter's School. It is in the centre, left of the picture and was run as a second elementary school by the Parish Church.

In the background you will be able to make out a property which is still standing, the takeaway in Parker Lane. On the even side of Boot Street the foreground shows the ends of the terraces which comprise Miller Street, Norton Street, Pickup Street and Hatter Street. Some of these streets I remember as an unplanned warren of houses, some typical terraced houses, others small back-to-backs. The houses between Miller Street and Norton Street were very small back-to-backs and there were others in Pickup Street, Hatter Street and beyond that in Croft Street.
There is no indication, in the first photo, that the newer properties of Croft Street had been built, but if you look at the second picture you will see that, extreme right, you can see that part of what became Moneysave and later Kwik Save. In the foreground, the warren of streets has been cleared in preparation for the building of the bus station. Of course the 1960s bus station has since been replaced by the one we now have on the same site.

The site itself has an interesting history. Like much of Burnley it was farm land until the Industrial Revolution made claim to it. The area was known as Pickup Croft as it constituted part of the land of the house of that name in Manchester Road, now known as Green Hill. The street names Croft Street (still in use) and Pickup Street remind us of this. Miller Street got its name because it was very close to Pillingfield Corn Mill. This latter building was quite impressive not because of its architecture but because it was the only building on this stretch of the canal whose site was actually cut into the embankment.

Referring to street names, it would be remiss not to mention Aqueduct Street and Boot Street itself. The former takes its name from the nearby canal. Of course the Culvert is really, though its name denies it, an aqueduct but this is not the feature which gave its name to the street. If you have a look behind the present Tesco supermarket you will see the Calder Aqueduct which carries the Leeds and Liverpool Canal over the river Calder. It is from this that the street takes its name. Boot Street, the name, must come from the former Boot Inn in St James's Street which, until its recent closure, was latterly a Yates' Wine Lodge.

The third picture, as indicated above, shows Boot Way in 1985. The photo was taken by Burnley's Planning Office as illustrative of a new pedestrianised street. Some of you will remember the shops on the left but the next building, separated from the shops by Boot Passage, was once the Jereh Baptist Church. Further along you can see the modern elevation of what was the Moneysave and Kwik Save stores. It was built on the site of Collinge's, once a very well-known hardware shop.

I recall the firm moving to Plumbe Street when the building you see in the photo was built.

Though little can be seen there is a reminder (the sign with a triangle on it) of the Inn Plaice, the Bass owned pub which occupied part of the ground floor of the newer buildings to the right. The foreground shows a display of flowers for sale at what was Bridge's greengrocer's shop. There is still a greengrocer's at this site but just about all the other traders have gone, as has Boot Street itself.

As I indicated, at the beginning of this article, Boot Street was not the most photogenic of streets. There photos of individual buildings - the school, the pubs (the Three Horse Shoes and Devonshire Arms) but a record of what Boot Street itself looked like in earlier times we owe to photographers like Ken Bolton who took the trouble to take a number of pictures before the buildings were lost forever.