"Bak yam" a Oldham Travel Page by Balam

After recently celebrating 150 years of municipal status, Oldham is experiencing a period of renewal and economic regeneration that has parallels with the way the Borough developed during the latter half of the 19th century, when it enjoyed a phase of remarkable growth.

Achieving this mantle was by no means straightforward - Oldham was blessed with fewer natural resources than its neighbouring rivals. It is on a hillside and it had poor transport links. In addition, its high altitude - 700 feet above sea level - posed severe engineering challenges to canal and railway builders. Yet the original town grew to a point when it was consuming more raw cotton and spinning more yarn than any other single centre of the industry.

This level of success was achieved largely through the determination, perseverance and ingenuity of Oldham's people, who put to good use what advantages the town possessed - its high humidity, its reserves of coal and its proximity to the factories burgeoning on both sides of the Pennines, especially those in and around Manchester. As world demand for cotton grew, so Oldham's share of spindleage increased. By 1890 it has risen to 11.4 million out of 87.7 million - 13 per cent of the world's total production.

With this increase in market share came an increase in the size and number of Oldham's mills - from 50,000 spindles in 1870, to 90,000 by 1890 and no fewer than 17.8 million at the industry's peak in 1926 - 30 per cent of the total for the whole of Lancashire. The number of mills rose to a peak of 320 in 1918.

Oldham's industrial workers played a prominent role in the struggle for the vote, electing radical candidates John Fielden and William Cobbett and forming a Hampden Club in 1816. There was also a flourishing female political union in the town, 150 of whose members attended the meeting in Manchester on 16 August 1819 that resulted in the Peterloo Massacre.

When times were good for the mills they were also good for other industries. Mill construction provided the building industry with 50 years of highly profitable activity and the Oldham machine and steam engine manufacturers who gave life to the mills - notably Hibbert and Platt, Buckley and Taylor, Urmston and Thompson, Woolstenhulme and Rye - earned themselves legendary engineering reputations as well as generating wealth and creating jobs for thousands.

On the doorstep is the Pennine moorland of Saddleworth, extending into the Peak District National Park. The dramatic scenery of this countryside offers up a host of contrasts from the isolation of the reconstructed site of Castleshaw Roman Fort, one of a series built on the Roman military road from Chester to York, to the delightful village of Uppermill. Dobcross, once the commercial heart of the district, remains one of the most attractive villages in the Pennines and was used as the setting for the film Yanks. Its numerous weavers' cottages, clothiers' and merchants' houses surrounding the village square have remained virtually unchanged in 200 years.

Moving from the surrounding countryside into the town itself is to step into a rich municipal heritage. In the very centre of Oldham is Alexandra Park. The park, built in 1865, was funded by a government loan designed to boost jobs when the American Civil War caused supplies of cotton to dry up and left many people out of work. Alexandra Park covers 72 acres, with a boating lake at its heart, and features a statue of Joseph 'Blind Joe' Howarth (who held the job of town crier for 40 years) and a pagoda built as a meteorological observatory in 1899 to commemorate the town's Golden Jubilee.

Oldham Mumps

The area around the main railway station on the edge of Oldham town centre is known as 'Mumps'. The name Mumps or Mumps bridge first appears in the Oldham Parish Registers at the end of the 17th century. The origin of the name is not certain. Ga-mumpi is a very old word that means the land at the meeting of two streams. A stream used to run from Gravel Walks which met another stream which came from Bridgewater Street and down Brook Street (diverted when the railway was built). Another possible source for the name is that in early English dialect mumps meant alms, and a mumper was a beggar; as there was once a workhouse in the district it may have derived its name from this source.

Contrary to what might have been expected, the rapid period of industrialisation left vast swathes of the rural landscape virtually untouched. Today two-thirds of the Borough remain open countryside.

Although Oldham's existence can be traced back to the 11th century, it was the Industrial Revolution - and cotton in particular - that laid the foundations for the town's prosperity. By the end of the 19th century Oldham was recognised near and far as nothing less than the greatest cotton spinning town in the world.

Oldham has earned itself a place in history being a centre of the textile industry which flourished in the industrial revolution. The magnificent mill buildings which made Oldham one of the world's leading cotton spinning towns during the 19th and early 20th centuries are still evident. Its industrial past, so much wrapped up in the textile industry, is featured at both Oldham Museum and the independent Saddleworth Museum, housed in an old mill building.

Much of Oldham's town centre architecture is Victorian. The original Town Hall, with its inpressive facade, was built in 1841. Sir Winston Churchill made his inaugural acceptance speech from the Town Hall steps when he was first elected as a Conservative MP in 1900.

From its earliest days as an industrial centre, Oldham has had more than its share of people who have gained national prominence.
Amongst the most famous of these were radical reformers John Fielden and William Cobbett, both of whom were elected by Oldham after the passing of the 1831 Reform Act, and suffragette Annie Kenney.

In the past century Oldham has continued its tradition of attracting outstanding personalities ahead of the rest of the country by giving Winston Churchill his first parliamentary seat. Churchill's inaugural address was made from the steps of Oldham Town Hall in 1900.

But not all of Oldham's great and good have had such gravitas - certainly not Lancashire comedy legend Uncle Piehead, who came from the town and was in a long tradition of Oldham comics, thespians and broadcasters that have included Eric Sykes, Dora Bryan, Bernard Cribbins, Cannon and Ball, Syd Little (of Little and Large), Philip Schofield, Anne Kirkbride and various members of television's Coronation Street cast.

Louise Brown, the world's first test tube baby, was born in Oldham in 1978 thanks to the pioneering method of invitro-fertilisation developed by Mr Patrick Steptoe and Professor Robert Edwards. The Wrigley family, of chewing gum fame, hail from Dobcross.

Amongst sporting personalities with an Oldham connection are Michael Atherton, David Platt, Paul Scholes and Andy Ritchie, now manager of Oldham Athletic. If artists and performers are a measure of a town's status, then Oldham's reputation is assured. In addition to opera diva Dame Eva Turner and artist Helen Bradley, the most famous of all the town's musical sons is Sir William Walton, whose works are still regularly performed throughout the world and remembered by the annual Oldham Walton Festival as well as the stained glass roof of The Spindles Shopping Centre in the heart of Oldham. The stained glass roof is the creation of renowned artist Brian Clarke, himself Oldham born.

More contemporary performers from Oldham include musician Wayne Marshall, Mark Owen (of Take That fame), The Inspiral Carpets, N-Trance and (for those with memories of the sixties) Barclay James Harvest. Elephant Stone and Love Will Tear Us Apart, arguably two of the best records ever to come out of Manchester, were recorded in Oldham.