IT'S a visitor attraction now -- part of the new tour based on author William Woodruff's international best-seller, 'The Road to Nab End,' on growing up in Blackburn during the Depression era of the Twenties and Thirties.

The former Belper Street Baths -- seen above before its £1.5million revamp in 1992 which saw the old plunge replaced and the name changed to Daisyfield Pools -- have a special place in the 86-year-old writer's recollections as it's where he won a silver medal as a lad in a swimming race.

But when the 25-yard pool opened in 1906, having cost £9,000 to build, it was notable for the relief it brought to the strain that swimmers placed on the town's original pool at Freckleton Street which had opened in 1868.

For in the 20 years up to Belper Street's inception, the Freckleton Street Baths, despite being extended in 1884 to comprise first and second-class pools, struggled to cope with ever-rising demand. Attendances rocketed over the period from 38,464 a year to 147,792 in 1905.

As a result, the town found it increasingly difficult to squeeze in swimming lessons for schoolchildren. And when Belper Street's pool was officially opened, the chairman of the Baths Committee, Alderman W.H. Law, declared that it had been built more for the town's children than anyone else.

It was sent to Looking Back by its owner, 82-year-old Blackburn exile Gilbert Whalley, of Colchester, Essex, after reading this newspaper's recent report on the Woodruff tour's launch and Belper Street being one of its attractions.

And of the day in 1930 that he gained his still-treasured Certificate of Merit, he recalls: "I can see it now...a jolly, rotund man with a long pole held just out of my reach, saying: 'Cum on, lad -- you can do it; not far to go now.' That man was 'Mr' Harry Ward."

Harry Ward, whose signature appears on Gilbert's certificate, taught thousands of Blackburn youngsters to swim before he retired in 1938.

He gained fame in the early 1900s as a top open-water swimmer and local comedian and used to train in the boating lake at Queen's Park for then-popular national mile races in rivers like the Thames and Mersey.

But though the pressure on the Freckleton Street Baths was alleviated by Belper Street's opening and still more by the development of the Blakey Moor pool in 1911, demand for swimming facilities continued to soar in Blackburn. The Borough Engineer's Department came up with a grand plan in 1936 for a new two-pool baths and gymnasium, costing £82,000.

As well as a large gymnasium, the plan envisaged a 100ft by 40ft main pool for mixed bathing and a smaller 75ft by 30ft males-only plunge.

The abandonment of the scheme left Blackburn with facilities that were not only hard-pressed to cope with the rising number of swimmers, but were also becoming increasingly dated -- above all, at Freckleton Street where one of the two pools had to be demolished when it cracked in 1950 began to leak.

But still huge and increasing numbers squeezed into the town's three pools. In the 1950s, the total of bathers rose from 283,899 a year at the start of the decade to 309,815 in 1960 -- with a record 322,323 using the baths in 1959, a year famed for a searing summer that temperature-wise lasted until October.

That same year, free swimming lessons were given to 48,585 schoolboys at Belper Street and Freckleton Street and to 37,616 girls at the Blakey Moor pool, which, until its closure in 1998, was ladies-only for much of the time.

In 1969, age finally caught up with Freckleton Street Baths when it was declared a health risk and shut down after the collapse of its filtration plant. It was not until 1974 that the town got a replacement -- in the form of the 25-metre pool at the new Shadsworth Community Centre. But it took another dozen years before Blackburn's bathers got a truly-modern facility.

It was the £3.5 million Waves water fun centre, opened on virtually the same spot as that earmarked for the ambitious, but doomed plan of 1936. Thousands plunged in -- with up to 1,700 a day visiting Waves at peak periods.