FROM faraway Woy Woy in New South Wales, Australia, comes this picture of Mill Hill, Blackburn, at least 90 years ago when, as the belching factory chimneys show, the town's textile industry was running at full steam.

The view dates from the pre-First World War decade when cotton enjoyed such a boom that more than 20 new mills opened in Blackburn, bringing its total to 150 and turning it into the town that employed more weavers than any other in the world -- nearly 29,000 of them.

The picture is sent to Looking Back by Blackburn exile, 85-year-old Fred Marsden, who was brought up in now-gone Queen's Terrace, the row of houses at the left of the picture.

"I do not know the exact date of the photograph except to say that it is before 1913," says Fred, who has lived in Australia for 42 years. "In that year, the Congregational Chapel at the right had a bit of a facelift, with the tapered portion at the top of the tower being removed and a clock installed. How well I remember that clock, which chimed the hours and the quarters."

The clock -- with its four 6ft-diameter dials and four-note Cambridge chimes -- was a feature of Mill Hill for more than 50 years until it disappeared with the demolition of the Chapel in 1964.

The building dated from 1860, but Fred is right -- its 135ft tower was altered in 1913. And though the clock installed that year belonged to the church, it was paid for by a public subscription that raised £250 and the Town Council also helped by paying for it to be lit up at night. The view of Mill Hill in 1956 (bottom right) shows how the tower looked afterwards.

But, Fred wonders, what is the history of Overlockshaw Hall, the old building seen at the left of the earlier picture at the bottom of King's Bridge Street's slope where it joins New Chapel Street.

It was a large 17th-century house, built apparently, according Blackburn historian W.A. Abram, as a residence for a branch of the town's ancient Astley family whose seat was at nearby Stakes Hall -- a mansion long-vanished, but still recalled by its vicinity remaining named after it.

Above Overlockshaw Hall's porch was a stone, dated 1691, with the initials, T.A. and R.A., which Abram's history of the town said may have been those of Thomas and Richard Astley.

The Hall's name seems to have changed down the years. For in 1827 when Blackburn's first great cotton magnate, Henry Sudell, went bankrupt and his estates in Livesey were auctioned off, one of the lots was Overlock Shay Farm -- comprising the farmhouse, a shippon, other out-buildings, a cottage and 25 acres of land. And though in 1877 Abram gave its name as Overlockshay, it appears on an 1848 map of the area as Overlockshaw.

The house survived until 1920 when it was demolished to make way for the Palladium Cinema (bottom left) which opened the following year. The spot is now occupied by the Spar Grocer store which succeeded the Co-op supermarket which in 1963 was converted from the Palladium after its closure the previous year.