I WAS talking last week to a man who has just moved to live in Nelson with his family. He'd had an important job with a large firm and is setting up a business venture of his own.

So why come to Nelson which, historically like the rest of East Lancashire, has been an area where young people went off to university and college and often never came back?

Or from which just went to look for jobs in other parts of the country and abroad.

"I like the area," he said. "Nice people he may be biased because his wife comes from Nelson and wonderful countryside on the doorstep."

And nowadays, for a lot of jobs, it doesn't matter so much where you live. The internet and telecommunications mean you can live for much of the week where you choose.

I thought back to 1969 when my wife and I came to live in East Lancashire. I had been sent to Nelson and Colne by the Liberal Party to try to mount some kind of campaign in the 1968 by-election after Sydney Silverman died - the election in which David Waddington, now Lord Waddington, won a shock win for the Tories over Betty Boothroyd, before she went on to become famous as Speaker of the House of Commons.

We failed miserably in that election but I fell in love with the area. And when a teaching job cropped up in Colne a few months later, I jumped at the chance to come and live here.

The combination of genuine communities encircled by open Pennine countryside and wild moorlands was stunning. Yet, in those days, most of the local decision-makers (councillors, officials and even the local media) were determined to turn their backs on a past that to them meant poverty, hardship and squalor.

Things have changed, though some problems such as low wages, closing factories and substandard housing remain, and we have to live with the legacy of foolish and ugly "modernisation" of our town centres in the 1960s.

Burnley is still losing its population, though the last census showed Pendle had gained 5,000 more people than anyone had thought - and the two boroughs are now about the same size.

The Clean Air Act, removal of the outside tippler toilets (the notorious "long drop bogs"), the cumulative effect of hundreds of environmental improvements over the years, the removal of eyesores and rather more sensitive improvements to town centres, all this has transformed much of East Lancashire and it's still happening.

The question we all have to ask is: how precious is it to us?

As more people come to see our corner of Lancashire as many of us see it, will we have the strength and the vision to find the means to "progress" without destroying what is good about what we have?