WOOLWORTHS will forever be remembered as the place to buy pic 'n' mix; the store that sold music and clothes and household items and toys, and all manner of random items.

Woolworths was a child's dream (and probably many an adults too), but its final demise in 2009, was perhaps pre-empted some 27 years earlier, when in 1982, the famous high street chain store vanished from two of East Lancashire's major shopping centres.

Blackburn's massive store, and the purpose-built store at Burnley went up for sale at the beginning of the decade, along with 23 other Woolies throughout the country.

The sale was part of a £90million crackdown by the company, which was selling off its low profit retail centres.

The Blackburn branch of Woolworth's - which was one of the biggest in the North West - opened on Church Street/Ainsworth Street in 1926, and was extended once in 1960 and again in 1972.

The store employed a total of 74 staff when the sale was announced, and rumour had it that staff would be offered jobs elsewhere in the company.

In the 70s, Woolies in Blackburn was one of a batch of 70 stores in Britain selected to launch its new credit card scheme, which would eventually be extended to cover 1,000 branches.

In the 1980s the branch moved out of Blackburn before making a welcome return to the town in 1998.

The shock news for the Burnley branch came less than five years after the tills first rang out at the £1.5million purpose-built store.

Manager at the time, Alan Johnson, said the announcement had come as a complete surprise, as it was revealed that the Burnley premise was making enough money but not enough to justify continuing to trade.

A spokesperson for Woolworths in London said the asking price for the Burnley shop had not been decided but the company expected £90million from the sale of all 25 centres.

Despite this, the stores made a comeback, but it was to be relatively short-lived, as in 2009, the company announced it would be closing the doors to all of its stores, including branches in Clitheroe and Accrington, for good,.

This left customers wondering where they'd get their pic 'n' mix, and resulted in 27,000 people nationwide losing their jobs.