Blackburn v Burnley

I wrote this last week for EPL Talk, it was since picked up on BBC 606 and published on Burnley fans online site

It was generally well received on 606 and on the Burnley site, though some of the comments on EPL Talk questioned my decision to call the two town centres 'similar'(a bit picky perhaps? Or maybe just a bad reflection of my writing as that it is the only thing they can say about it!)

Anyway hope you like it:


Unless you are familiar with both towns it would be easy to confuse an image of Burnley for its near neighbour Blackburn. Both share the marauding rows of tight Victorian terraced housing, offering a window to England’s past and evoking images of men in cloth caps and the bustling noise and billowing smoke of busy cotton mills.

For those who don’t know the two East Lancashire towns played a key role in Britain’s industrial revolution at the end of the 19th century. Much of its growth surrounded the cotton industry and indeed, fuelled by the growth of the cotton mills, Blackburn became one of the first industrialised towns in the world, while Burnley became the biggest cotton producer on the planet.

What has this to do with football you may ask? Well alongside the cobbled streets and coke filled chimneys were two football clubs, whose roots are born in the industrial revolution. Both Blackburn and Burnley were founder members of the football league in 1888 and have established a rivalry older than the likes of Everton and Liverpool, Spurs and Arsenal and the two Manchester clubs.

Read the rest of this entry here, here or here.