WITH a giant superstore plan bringing the prospect of demolition to the old factory buildings near the Eanam roundabout in the town centre, Blackburn faces losing its last tangible link with a business that was once a byword around the world for heavy engineering excellence.

For it was from the Canal Works of Foster, Yates and Thom, in Manner Sutton Street, that flowed the steam engines, boilers and mammoth machines that drove industries around the world and at one time provided work for 1,500 men.

It says "1875" on the cast iron lintel above the entrance to the old boiler works but it was in 1824 that William Yates founded the business in what was little more than a blacksmith's shop. It grew into a huge engineering works, with massive workshops and gigantic overhead cranes, occupying 388,000 sq ft, but it fell silent in 1973 when fewer than 200 men worked there and production was switched by its owners, a London-based industrial conglomerate, to associate companies at Accrington and Bolton.

It was the threat of it disappearing that prompted reader Mrs Kathleen Ward, of Cross Barn Walk, Darwen, to show Looking Back these pictures of the works in its heyday -- among dozens rescued from the scrapheap by her late husband Ron, who, after starting as an apprentice in 1942, was one of the last two fitters employed there.

"He always said it was a great place to work and that there was a tremendous social life among the workforce, with the different departments taking each other on in football matches and so forth," said Mrs Ward. For a large part of its life the firm was known as Yates and Thom -- after founder William Yates and his sons took works manager William Thom into partnership. But in 1928 the business was taken over by rival Preston-based engineers Joseph Foster and Sons. By then, the Blackburn works had established a worldwide reputation for its heavy engineering expertise.

Lasting testaments to its workers' skills can be seen in many of the iron bridges along the Blackburn to Hellifield rail line and in the giant Darwen Street bridge in Blackburn.

But though it made all kinds of equipment -- from winding gear for collieries and engines for power stations to machines that moulded glass bottles and others that vulcanised rubber -- it was for its boilers and mill engines that the firm was particularly famed.

In the 1930s, it was reported that was scarcely a mill in India that did not have a Lancashire boiler that was made at the Canal Works.

Across the world, others were powered by the stationary steam engines it made, often as part of contracts it won for the complete design, construction and equipment of textile mills.

The firm withdrew from boiler manufacture in 1964 when it became uneconomic but for decades previously it was a common sight in Blackburn to see teams of horses, and, later heavy lorries, hauling giant boilers, enormous vessels and massive machines out of the works which for the past 25 years have been sub-divided for use by other firms.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.