ABSTRACT
The image of a 'Golden Age' figured in the culture of the Lancashire cotton industry for over a century. Geoffrey Timmins has remarked that ' in Lancashire, as in other British textile districts, the handloom weaver remained a familiar sight for a surprisingly lengthy period of time'. There was little to persuade Lancashire people in the 1850s and 1860s that a new Golden Age was being experienced. This period in the development of the industry in Lancashire was characterized chiefly by the problems of the 'cotton famine', and was remembered as a time of deprivation. A cluster of villages in the remote north-east corner of Lancashire became the site for a remarkable economic and urban transformation. The late flourishing of industrialization in north-east Lancashire, which saw the expansion into factory-based weaving towns of the old medieval boroughs of Burnley Gazette and Colne, and the creation from mere hamlets of an urban network centred upon the new town Nelson.
