MANY used to say of local authorities, including Bolton Council, that where the Luftwaffe failed during the Second World War, the local planners succeeded later.

It easy to cast one’s eye back over these images and shed more than a nostalgic tear because it not only spelled the end of the British Empire, it also spelled the end of many of those dark satanic mills, which littered the borough in a disused, dilapidated state of ruin.

While many of those mills stood as testament to the country’s ‘greatness’ the housing that many of the workers lived in were constructs of Victorian building of the worst type and design, where cheapness was all that mattered.

The people who inhabited those terraced streets will often look back with pride in saying their two up two down was ‘a happy time’ when most had little in the way of money and making sure you shopped at the Co-op and got the ‘divi’ would be the only way to ensure there was a turkey on the table at Christmas.

The bulldozers were no respecter of buildings, whether they be houses, ancient halls, bridges, churches, theatres cinemas or even streets and roads, they all came down or even up, in the wake of the mighty swinging ball or the simple workman’s pickaxe – they rose and they fell.

While the sadness is that many of the town centre houses would have survived another 100 years with an upgrade these houses which look of solid stock were pulled down on Bolton’s Fold Street in January 1969 to make way for the new shopping developments Bradshawgate can be seen at the end of the street, where the Riviera Bar and Tapaz Ristorante currently occupy.

Further afield we see young children walking past the demolition of property on Sidney Street, Great Lever and these people can look on in sadness at the demolition of houses at Charles Street, off Folds Road in September 1955.

Close to the town centre we see an image from 1954 of people complaining to Councillor W. Walsh that the demolition going on around them was putting their children and passers-by at risk of being hit by falling masonry at Partridge Street

The Wheatsheaf pub was pulled down in 1962 to make way for a more modern bar by the same name to replace the 1835 building. It was a similar picture as we look along Newport Street which have been cleared and the site prepared for development.

The Damside Aqueduct at Darcy Lever bit the dust in June 1965. Or the chewed out piece of what remains of Irwell Bank Mill, once Europe’s biggest, which bit the dust in April 1977. In 1963 here are workmen walking across steel girders during the demolition of Bolton Theatre Royal in a picture taken by Dorothy Cloynes.