AH, the good old days! I’ve a large aerial photograph on the wall in my kitchen, of Blackburn town centre in the early 1960s.

It wasn’t very nice. In fact, it was close to horrible.

Run-down, grimy, soot-covered buildings dominate the townscape.

There was very little to lift the spirit.

In one corner, you can see that some demolition had taken place. The site was being cleared for the new covered market on the east of Ainsworth Street, to replace the Victorian market, and the open stalls on King William Street. That was then the main north/south traffic artery – which added coughing and spluttering from filthy exhausts to the town’s other ‘attractions’.

I’ve always understood why the town’s leaders decided to sweep away so much of the old.

The problem was that a lot of the new wasn’t so good, either, and much of that (like the 1960s market) has had to come down.

And the town centre has become a daytime-only venue – busy enough when shops and offices are open, but with very little of the evening activity that used to make the town very lively, even a decade ago.

But I am optimistic that 2014 will be the year when the town centre’s fortunes really revived.

With the new Mall, and market, Blackburn has been beating the trend in retail.

This year will see the Cathedral Quarter development come to life.

Whitbread’s, the big leisure and retail group have shown their faith – by investing a lot of money in the new Premier Inns hotel in the new Quarter.

There’s to be new residential accommodation, including for the clergy and their families (and the contribution which the Cathedral itself makes to the town’s economy, as well as to our spiritual life, is often under-estimated); a new, more convenient bus station.

With luck all this may underpin greater success for the evening economy too.

I’ll write a column at the beginning of 2015 on whether my optimism for this year has been correct.

Meanwhile, have a happy one.