ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some personal thoughts on the recording of industrial archaeology in the urban historic environment. The opening verse of Ewan MacColl's 1959 song Dirty Old Town offers a glimpse of human intimacy set against a backdrop of urban industry. The origins of industrial archaeology as a volunteer pastime in the 1950s and 1960s influenced the type and location of sites that were selected for study. To begin with, industrial archaeologists were primarily concerned with the recording and preservation of industrial monuments. The recording of industrial archaeology in towns, which was at best piecemeal prior to the 1980s, was also dealt with in a separate way, under the guise of architectural investigation, to rescue archaeology. Urban industrial archaeology in the northwest should therefore take account of the symbiotic link between Blackpool and the textile mills and back-to-back terraced houses of Bolton, Burnley, and Blackburn, as it was from here that families streamed each summer to the resort.
