Home Fires in Lancashire

“Post-industrial” is already passé. It’s time to explore Britain’s most familiar, least understood historic county, says Chris Moss.

I returned to my native Lancashire in May 2021, after a break of almost four decades. It was a post-pandemic urge, part of a bid to fly less, explore the UK more. Also a feeling that “home” (the idea, the reality) was worth some time and attention. I was born in 1966 in the south-west of the county. I moved back to the north-east. Not too close, then. On the day I made the move, a publisher emailed me out of the blue to propose a book about the “North-West of England”. My fate was sealed.   

Lancashire is long overdue a re-evaluation, and not only by me. It’s a century since the Industrial Revolution really began to peter out. Half as many years since administrative borders were redrawn and this once mightily powerful, populous region (more than five million in the early 1970s) was carved up. 

Great shifts

Liverpool and Manchester were politically dislocated from the towns whose people built them, worked in them, fought in their regiments. The changes experienced by Lancastrians in recent times are almost as convulsive as the great shift of peoples from rural to urban settings between 1770 and 1850.

Today, those who worked in cotton mills, coal mines and heavy industrial factories are few – and they’re getting on; those with memories of Lancashire as a predominantly industrial county are hovering around retirement age.

Poets and metropolitan pundits alike have played loose with the notion of the “post-industrial”, and I wanted to explore what that might mean. Did it denote decline or reinvention? Was the “clean-up” resulting from the closures and wind-downs in any respects welcome? Was it even an accurate term for a diverse, complex, densely inhabited area that includes former textile nexuses like Blackburn and Rochdale, Rugby and colliery towns like Wigan and St Helens, ancient Clitheroe and Lancaster, Blackpool and Warrington, as well as hundreds of hamlets and villages, estates and leisure spaces – where many thousands of people still work on shop floors, in overalls, and still build machinery and other manufactures? 

Seeing with fresh eyes

As well as spending days in my local libraries, I visited as many places and landscapes as I could. After so many years away, I couldn’t help but experience Lancashire partly as a travel writer, as well as a homecoming native and a cultural historian. As someone raised on the West Lancashire Plain – the lowlands that lie between our two big cities – I am, anyway, on foreign soil in the Pennine and Bowland regions. The greatest epiphany when you decide to visit what’s on your doorstep is how little you actually know it. I thank Lancastrians for welcoming me back and re-educating me. There’s still a quintessential warmth and tolerance here. 

Sharing and discovering

Now I am greatly looking forward to sharing these insights and knowledge with others. This new tour will allow me to air personal stories and show favourite landmarks – Pendle Hill, Liverpool’s docklands, Manchester’s Whitworth – as well as explore the broad sweep of history. 

Lancashire in the 21st century is a dynamic place. Its Michelin-starred food routinely attracts national press attention; its sports and popular music scenes are internationally influential. Manchester’s reinvention and Liverpool’s redevelopment divide local opinion, but they show cities not willing to be merely “post”-places. The region’s thriving concert venues, theatres, literature festivals, art galleries and arts scene in general rival what’s on offer in London. But what all visitors immediately note here is a common sense of belonging. Lancashire came quite late to the historical fray – it isn’t named in the Domesday Book – but has had a seminal role in modern world history, its highs and lows woven into the fortunes of the UK and the rise and implosion of the British Empire. The drama binds people, through thick and thin.

I sometimes wonder if Lancashire isn’t too famous or, at least, familiar. Everybody assumes they know what it’s about, and I’d include residents there, as well as blow-ins and tourists. But it’s not what they think. This county used to make everything; now it is re-making itself. It’s time to take stock: reconsider, rediscover.

Lancashire: Exploring the Historic County that Made the Modern World by Chris Moss is published by Old Street on 17 February, 2026.

‘Lancashire: The Making of the Modern World’ runs for 7 days from 14–20 September 2026. Book now on our website.