THE Friends of Darwen Library are becoming experts at jogging the memories of local folk with their regular in-house displays.

Royal visits and celebrations was their most recent exhibition and now they have come up with an unusual display of advertisements for well-known local shops and services going back 100 years and more.

It will be unveiled in time for the Friends’ annual pre-Christmas coffee morning which takes place on Saturday, November 26.

Said Friends’ chairman Kath Farnworth: “Our displays always go down well and stir a lot of memories. This latest exhibition is certainly a bit unusual but I’m sure it will be very popular.”

Local folk will remember - or at least heard of - some of them, such as Shepherd’s, Knowles’, Freeman Hardy & Willis, Ben Worsley’s, Fairhurst’s, Wm Berry’s and, of course, the Darwen Industrial Co-operative Society.

The Criterion Cafe, the Theatre Royal and Darwen Steam Laundry are all remembered to this day, while among the oldest Darwen shops still going strong are the Saddler’s at the bottom of Bolton Road, the cake shop in Bridge Street, the wine shop at the top of Duckworth Street and Gibson’s the ironmonger.

The adverts on show were gleaned from several publications and from various dark corners.

Some go back to a Darwen Advertiser Christmas magazine of 1895, the booklet Pictorial Darwen of 1904, and church magazines of the 1920s.

It was a different world 100 years and more ago.

It was a long time before the Co-op opened the town’s first self-service store in Market Street in 1955, followed a few years later by Tesco who opened a little shop in Bridge Street.

Possibly the biggest loss and most fondly remembered was the Peacock’s pasty shop on the main road.

More than 3,000 pasties were baked every weekend to satisfy the queues that snaked round the corner at the bottom of Vale Street.

In the ‘old days’ you could buy an elegant top hat from Dalton’s in Duckworth Street for 8s 6d or pick up a ‘black coat and vest’ for 30s from Grimshaw’s, the tailors on the Market Square.

The George Inn had livery stables round the back and also offered ‘wedding equipages’, which must have been smart carriages.

Hacking’s Borough Wine Stores at the bottom of Bolton Road sold large bottles of champagne for five bob and a bottle of Scotch for half a crown.

It must have been fun getting married in Darwen over a century ago. An equipage to the church, on to the ‘luxurious cafe’ at the mock-Tudor-timbered Criterion – and everyone blotto on champers and scotch for, say, a tenner. Happy days!