The St Peter's Centre is the largest to have been completed, though, even this will be put into the shade by the Building Schools for the Future project and the new Burnley College/UCLan. Centre beginning to take shape near the railway viaduct.

I want, this week, to take you back to another building project, one which was very important in its day and perhaps more so than the contemporary examples I have mentioned.

The photo is of parts of two very well-known public buildings in Manchester Road, although readers can be forgiven if they do not recognise them immediately. Unfortunately, the information on the photo might not be all that helpful as it names the building as the School of Art!

This latter is correct, although neither of the two buildings shown in the picture are so called these days. On the left, the building under construction is the present Burnley Town Hall. On the right, you can see a small portion of what was the Mechanics Institute, now the Mechanics Theatre. In the middle there is something of a mystery; what appears to be the fragment of an earlier building and it could be that this is the School of Art referred to on the photo.

I say this as there is some uncertainty about where the original Burnley School of Art was located. We know it was founded in 1871 by the Towneley family and that, in 1872, it was located at 39 Manchester Road, Burnley. However, 39 Manchester Road is below, rather than above, Yorke Street and it would be where the barber's shop is today.

However, on the photo we have the words, as they are in full, "School of Art, adjacent to the Mechanics Institute". This could be a reference to the fact the School of Art moved into the Mechanics Institute at some time, possibly as a consequence of extension work at the Mechanics in 1887-8.

The foundation stone for the Mechanics Institute was laid in 1851 by Col. Charles Towneley, the building being completed and opened in 1855. The site was part of the Bull Croft and had previously been used as one of Burnley's many market gardens. In fact, in this respect, the site, which also included that of the town hall, has something of a special place in history because a number of modern varieties of gooseberry were developed on this land... but that is another story.

I have in my possession another photo of the Mechanics. It was taken before the one you see today and it shows the Mechanics with, to its left (ie. further up Manchester Road) and, apparently conjoined, another building. The site of the Town Hall is not built on, although there is property on the other side of the Calder. This conjoined building is larger than the structure in the middle of the photo. It had five windows on the top floor rather than the two seen in the picture.

If you look at the photo you will see there is a door, at ground floor level, on the left of the large window. In the older picture, this door is one of two or possibly three – the other(s) must have been demolished when preparing for the construction of the Town Hall. In addition, the old photo shows the tops of three chimney stacks each with nine chimney pots on them. It must have been that there were originally three houses here and the photo you have in front of you shows the last of these buildings to survive.

If I am not mistaken I think this property (certainly one of the three) became the offices of a long-forgotten Burnley company, George Fraser, Son & Co., cotton merchants. In about 1887, it seems the building was demolished to make way for what is there now, a new entrance to the large hall in what was then the Mechanics Institute.

Of course, the hall is now the theatre itself. There is accommodation above the new entrance, but, if you examine the building, you will see that the architect of what amounts to the new extension, William Waddington, has not attempted to slavishly copy the earlier work of James Green, the original architect of the Mechanics.

At about the same time, 1887-8, another extension, known as the Jubilee Wing, was opened at the Mechanics. This is at the rear of the building and can be observed from the Yorke Street elevation where you will notice that Waddington has not copied, although he has respected, Green's design. It is this wing that I had always assumed was the home of the School of Art.

The confusion arises as there were two extensions to the Mechanics designed by the same architect and built at the same time. It should also be remembered that, while this was going on, the town hall itself was under construction and this can be seen in the photo. Notice the scaffolding and building work being undertaken on the roof of the town hall.

We are fortunate to have such a good photo of the town hall and the Mechanics at an important time in their development. The former is 120 years old, so we should be thinking about planning to celebrate its 125th anniversary very shortly.

I would like to thank Mr and Mrs Terry and Stephanie Sutcliffe for permission to use the photo which accompanies this article.