BURIED beneath the three-day market since 1964, this bit of town-centre Blackburn, top, previously served as a parking space for the corporation's buses.

And, at the time of year when the picture was taken, as a resting place for the vehicles and caravans of the showmen who staged the Easter Fair.

Groups of their giant mobile homes can be glimpsed with their chimneys smoking behind the two double-deck buses at the right.

One of the vehicles pictured behind the single-deck bus belonged to Bert Hughes's Boxing Pavilion which, billed as the Home of Champions, was one of the fair's major attractions for decades.

It attracted crowds with three-round bouts in which local young braves tried to win a cash purse by going the distance with the booth's professional bruisers -- who frequently feigned difficulty for the first two rounds before battering their opponents to defeat in the last.

A clue to the date of the picture of the spare land lying between now-vanished Water Street and Ainsworth Street, running across the background of this view, is provided by the buses, as the single-decker No.10 entered the town's fleet in March, 1948, and the double-decker nearest to it, Leyland TD4-type No. 39, was taken out of service in December, 1956.

Water Street took its name from the River Blakewater, which ran in the channel behind the buses before disappearing underground at Salford Bridge some 100 yards downstream.

Glimpsed in top picture on the corner of Union Street and Ainsworth Street is one of Blackburn's oldest inns -- the former St John's Tavern, which was named after St John's Church which overlooks it at the rear right.

Seen below in 1953, the inn was demolished to make way for the town's new market -- and a replacement pub of the same name -- which opened in November, 1964. Known at one time as the Gaping Goose, the old pub had premises at the rear that were occupied in the 1830s by engraver Richard Dugdale.

He was born in the 1790s at Mitton, near Whalley, and became locally famed as the Bard of Ribblesdale, despite never having had a day's schooling in his life.

He was also self-taught as an engraver -- a skill he showed off in his '80s by engraving the entire Lord's Prayer on an old threepenny bit, about the same size as a present-day 5p coin, with "every letter being distinctly cut," according to a biography of him in George Hull's 1902 Poets and Poetry of Blackburn.