Town in Lancashire, England
Burnley
A Lancashire mill town where the football team once ruled England, a canal embankment towers over the rooftops, and a tree on the hill sings in the wind.
Key information
- County
- Lancashire
- Nation
- England
- Known for
- Cotton weaving, Burnley FC, the Straight Mile canal embankment, the Singing Ringing Tree
- What locals are called
- Burnleyites
- Famous people
- Ian McKellen, James Anderson, Harry Potts, Sean Dyche
- Football clubs
- Burnley FC (the Clarets), Turf Moor
About Burnley
The league champions from a mill town
Burnley is one of the smallest places ever to produce a champion of English football. Burnley FC won the old First Division in 1920–21 and again in 1959–60, the second time by winning 2-1 at Manchester City on the final day of the season. The first title came with a run of 30 league games without defeat, a single-season top-flight record that stood until Arsenal's unbeaten 2003–04 campaign. In 1914 the club also won the FA Cup, beating Liverpool 1-0 at Crystal Palace. King George V presented the trophy, the first time a reigning monarch had attended an FA Cup final. The 1960 title took the team into the European Cup, where they reached the quarter-finals before losing to Hamburg. Burnley were also founder members of the Football League in 1888.
Why they're the Clarets
Burnley's claret and blue shirts are borrowed. In 1910 the club dropped its earlier colours and copied Aston Villa, the most successful side of the age. Claret became the club's nickname, and it has never been changed. Turf Moor, the home ground, has hosted Burnley since 1883, and cricket was played on the site before football. Its stands carry local names, including the Jimmy McIlroy Stand, after the Northern Ireland inside-forward who was the star of the 1960 side. The road outside is Harry Potts Way, after the manager who built it. In more recent times, Sean Dyche's long spell in charge, from 2012 to 2022, took Burnley to seventh in the Premier League in 2017–18 and into European qualifiers.
The town that wove for the world
Burnley sits where the River Calder meets the River Brun, with the Pennines behind it. The Brun gave the town its name. For centuries it was a handful of farms and a market. Then cotton arrived. By the late Victorian era the valley was packed with weaving sheds, and Burnley was among the world's biggest producers of cotton cloth. Coal from local pits fed the boilers, and hundreds of mill chimneys marked the skyline. The survivors are the best way to see it. Queen Street Mill at Harle Syke is the last surviving steam-powered weaving mill in the world, still driven by its engine, which is called Peace. In town, the Weavers' Triangle preserves the mills, warehouses, workers' cottages and canal wharves of the boom years.
A mile of canal in the sky
The Leeds and Liverpool Canal passes through Burnley on the Straight Mile, an embankment about 1,256 yards long, nearly three quarters of a mile, and up to 60 feet high. The canal runs above the rooftops, with the town laid out below. It was built between 1796 and 1801, and boats carrying coal and cotton glided across it. It is still a grand piece of Georgian engineering. Walkers and boaters now follow the towpath where the cargoes once moved.
A singing tree on the hill
Up on Crown Point above the town stands the Singing Ringing Tree, a sculpture made of galvanised steel pipes that hums and whistles when the wind blows. It went up in 2006 as one of four Panopticons in East Lancashire. It takes its name from a 1957 East German fairy-tale film that was first shown on British television in 1964. On the other side of the town is Towneley Hall, the old home of the Towneley family, now a museum and art gallery in a large park. Beyond the town to the north-northwest rises Pendle Hill, whose witches of 1612 are among Lancashire's most famous stories. Food is Lancashire fare: meat and potato pie, Lancashire hotpot and a good pie and peas on a cold match day.
Famous Burnleyites
Locals are called Burnleyites. The town's best-known son is probably Sir Ian McKellen, born here in 1939 before his family moved to Wigan and later Bolton. He went on to play Gandalf and Magneto, and to become one of Britain's great Shakespearean actors. Burnley also gave cricket James Anderson, born in the town in 1982, who learned the game at Burnley Cricket Club and finished as England's leading Test wicket-taker with 704 wickets. And football's stories keep coming. Harry Potts, who led the club to the 1960 title, and Sean Dyche, who restored its Premier League status, both made their names in claret and blue.