, the main parish church of Darwen The area around Darwen has been inhabited since the early
Bronze Age and the remains of a
round barrow from approximately 2000 BCE have been partially restored at the Ashleigh Barrow in Whitehall. The barrow had ten interments, nine of which were Collared Urn burials; as well as human remains, items found at the barrow included a bronze dagger some in length, a flint thumb scraper, a sub-plano-convex knife and a clay bead. Copies of the Collared Urns may be seen at the
Darwen Library. The
Romans once had a force in Lancashire and a
Roman road is visible on the
Ordnance Survey map of the area; medieval Darwen was tiny and little or nothing survives. One of the earliest remaining buildings is a farmhouse at Bury Fold, dated 1675. Whitehall Cottage is thought to be the oldest house in the town and was built mostly in the 17th and 18th centuries, but contains a chimney piece dated 1557. Like many towns in Lancashire, Darwen was a centre for
textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution.
Samuel Crompton, inventor of the
spinning mule, lived there for part of his life. The railway and the
Leeds and Liverpool Canal arrived in the mid-19th century. The most important textile building in Darwen is India Mill, built by
Eccles Shorrock & Company. The company was ruined, however, by the effects of the
Lancashire Cotton Famine of the 1860s. Cotton manufacture was an important industry and the
Darwen Weavers', Winders' and Warpers' Association had more than 8,000 members in the town by 1907. In the early 1840s. Eccles Shorrock created a large mill lodge (industrial reservoir) in what is now the lower part of Bold Venture Park, by constructing a dam where Inverness Road now runs across the valley cut by Bold Venture Brook. In 1848, during a night of heavy thunder storms and torrential rain, water rushed down from the moors and the dam failed catastrophically. The water level dropped by almost instantly and a wall of water swept down into the town centre, causing considerable damage and drowning several people who slept in cellars under shops and houses in the Market Street area. Much of the town was built between about 1850 and 1900. Many clues reflect this: placenames, date stones in terraces, the vernacular architecture of cellars, local stone, locally-made brick, pipework, tiles and leaded glass. It was one of the first places in the world to have steam trams.
Andrew Carnegie financed a
public library here; the town also had an art and technology college, and a grammar school. (Madeleine Slade) In 1931, Darwen was visited by
Mahatma Gandhi, he had accepted the invitation from Corder Catchpool, Quaker manager of the Spring Vale Garden Village Ltd, to see the effects of India's boycott of cotton goods. India Mill is now home to many companies, including Brookhouse (producers of
aeroplane parts) and
Capita Group, which runs
TV licensing. Since the 1950s, the textile industry has strongly declined in the region, although many industrial buildings from the period survive, now used for other purposes. India Mill and its chimney were sold in a £12 million deal. Among Darwen's other notable employers include: •
Crown Paints, formerly Walpamur Paints, the earliest British paint manufacturer, which named one of its paints
Darwen Satin Finish •
Crown Wallpaper manufactured wallpaper,
Lincrusta and
Anaglypta in the town. In 2004, Crown Wallcoverings, previously one of the biggest businesses in the town, closed with the loss of more than 200 jobs. •
ICI Acrylics (now called Lucite International) was where
acrylic glass (Perspex for windows and signage, and Sani-ware or Lucite used for the manufacture of baths and shower trays) was invented; it is still manufactured in two separate plants within the town •
Spitfire canopies and (later) coloured polythene washing-up bowls were first made here. A heritage centre opened in 2016 ==Governance==