Oldham - Then and Now

After several circuits of Oldham's elusive town centre on rain-swept urban motorways lined with traffic cones it was tempting to wonder if F H. Cheetham FSA had a point. Cheetham toured Lancashire between 1908 and 1916 gathering material for the 1920 Little Guide to the country. Oldham, he proclaimed, 'the chief of the Lancashire cotton spinning towns, is singularly unattractive and without interest to the archaeologist'. The soot-blackened townscape offered him no fine mansions or ancient halls and even the parish church had been rebuilt in unacceptably modern 'Crude Gothic' style as recently as 1829. He did not pause to comment on the church's lavish painted interior, to wonder at Oldham's growth from almost nothing in the eighteenth century, to one of Britain's most populous places by the middle of the nineteenth, or to note that by 1871 this single town possessed more cotton spindles than any other country in the world apart from the USA.