A MARKER stone was laid in St James’s Street, Burnley, after an Improvement Act was passed in 1819.

It was known as a ‘merestone’ and the improvement commissioners were required to put it in the middle of the street, opposite the great front door of the Black Bull Hotel, at the bottom of Manchester Road.

This had become the centre of Burnley, shifting from its original place outside St Peter’s Church, and it was here that the weekly market took place.

In 1823, the old gas lamp Gormless was also placed in the centre.

When the merestone was first laid, it was required to be ‘level with the pavement in such mannier as that it shall not be an annoyance to horses of carriages passing along the same street.’ It marked the centre of a circle three quarters of a mile in radius which marked the extent of the town at the time.

Eventually, this came to be known as the ‘police circle’ – the zone of police responsibility.

The 1819 Act was never fully implemented, but the stone was put in place.

It was not until another Improvement Act in 1846 that the commissioners took over the responsibility for paving, lighting, cleansing, regulating and improving the town and for better supplying the inhabitants with gas and water ‘within the police circle’.

The commissioners bought the private Burnley Water Company and Burnley Gas Company and also built Burnley Cemetery It is not certain when the merestone disappeared, the most likely time was when the tram lines were laid in 1881.

Other major datelines for Burnley were the arrival of electricity in 1893 and the electrification of the trams in 1901.

But the days of trams were numbered. Motor buses were introduced in 1924 and 11 years later, the era of the trams came to an end.

The Palace Theatre was built in 1907 and Burton’s building replaced the Bull in 1933.

The Swan Inn, which still stands today, was originally a farm and is the oldest surviving building in the town centre.

The Bull, too, was also a farm two centuries and more ago, with a brewhouse, but in the early 1800s owner, the Rev John Hargreaves had it rebuilt into the biggest hotel in Burnley, with an array of bedrooms, bars, a dining room and meeting rooms.

It played an important role in the history of the town — coaches ran their services from here and it also provided facilities for meetings of the town’s Improvement Commission.

n To mark the 150th anniversary of Burnley’s Charter of Incorporation of 1861, Burnley Civic Trust installed a commemorative merestone in the pavement in St James’s Street, close to Fleet Walk.