This article, as much about the town as the Clarets, was published in The Guardian in May 1988. It generally paints a gloomy picture, which presumably explains why Burnley's Wembley appearance that very month is not mentioned.

The Roll call of urban decrepitude is read out on Radio 2 every Saturday at about three minutes past five . . . Rochdale 0, Halifax 0, Stockport 0, Scunthorpe 0 . . . the usual dismal news for the sad-sounding towns of uttermost England. The Fourth Division of the Football League has come to seem like a repository of the Britain left behind in the 1980s: uneconomic, dated, provincial, and kept going out of unfashionable sentiment. But Thatcherism has reached even this forsaken corner of English life.

It used to be extremely difficult to be kicked out of the Football League. Now the old featherbedding has finished: the bottom club is automatically demoted. Over the next few years many of the old names are likely to vanish from the pools coupons to be replaced by teams from thriving Thatcherite places like Barnet, Weymouth, and Maidstone.

If their football clubs go, some of the towns may vanish from the national consciousness completely. So it seemed a good idea to investigate the condition of part of Fourth Division England before that turns Tory too: Burnley, for instance, who last May were one desperate last day win away from being the first club booted out.

Burnley, for heavens sake! In 1921 Burnley F.C. were Champions of the Football League, and went 30 games without defeat. The town, meanwhile, wove more cotton than anywhere else in Lancashire or the World; there were 100,000 people and 100,000 looms. It was said that the Burnley weavers clothed Britain before breakfast and spent the rest of the day clothing the world. Fancy stuff came from Blackburn, checks from Nelson; the peasants of India and China did not wear fancy stuff: they wore Burnley greycloth. The town thrived and the names of the half-back line - Halley, Boyle and Watson - echoed around the country.

In 1960 the footbalI team were League Champions again. By now Asia had its own textile industry but the town still knew what its strengths were: cotton, coal, Burnley F.C, then run by the fat and famously autocratic pork butcher Bob Lord, and the Burnley Building Society.

In 1988 all the old certainties have vanished. Bob Lord is long dead. The Burnley pits, 18 of them in 1946, have all closed. Even the building society has gone. The football club clings on, just. Likewise cotton. But no peasant is likely to be wearing Burnley cloth unless the fashion is for bandages or household dusters.

With failure has come cleanliness. If you stood on the hills above the town in 1960 all you could see were the tallest mill chimneys poking above the pall of smoke. The privet hedges were black and the moorland bracken stunted; even the sheep were smoky grey. One day at Turf Moor, when Spurs were in town, Danny Blanchflower, their captain, watched the crowd trudging through the drizzle and said to Jimmy McIlroy, Burnley's star inside right, "How the hell do you live in a place like this?"

McIlroy still lives there, along with a decreasing number of other people. The population of the old county borough area is down to around 3,000 and six per cent of the houses are empty. BBC2's Horizon has come up with the frightening statistic that even in the clean air 70's, mortality was 21 per cent above the national average.

Yet it is actually a very likeable town, one that makes you realise that on the most important indices, the levels of sheer human friendliness and decency, the Southeast is bottom by a very long way. But what is Burnley now for? It is not an easy question.

Cotton is one answer, sort of. Just outside town there are hundreds of looms at Brierfield owned by Smith and Nephew turning out medical gauze and swabs from a gaunt stone mill, just the sort there might have been trouble at a century ago. Now there is hardly anyone there to cause it. This is textile hi-tech. There are 500 looms in weaving sheds No.1 and 2, rooms the size of the football ground with the unmistakeable weaving-shed racket: ker-ponk, ker-ponk, ker-ponk. I looked round for the people. In the distance there were a couple of mill girls in denims. In the 30s there was much unrest in Burnley when the mill-owners tried to enforce a system of six looms per weaver instead of the traditional four. At Brierfield, the figure is 90.

A mile away the real, old thing still exists at the Queen Street mill, which has been turned into a working, steam-powered museum, rather a good one actually, which ought to be playing its full part in our new but precarious growth industry, taking in each other's folklore. It remains chronically, and maybe terminally, short of cash. The council are ambivalent about Queen Street. It is one of the glories of Fourth Division England that its towns still have Labour councils of the sort that in more sophisticated spots would themselves have qualified for a heritage museum.

I attended a meeting of the Burnley Policy and Resources Committee and in the hour before I nodded off not a soul mentioned the implications for lesbians of the new shopping centre and it was 50 minutes before the token trendy mentioned South Africa. Burnley's ratepayers have been saved a good deal of money and crassness by the councillors' conservatism, but it has left the town short of good ideas as well.
"They're decent, honest working men," says the local journalist and conservationist Richard Catlow, "but they are a bit short of imagination. They'd still knock anything down to build a superstore. You try and convince them to preserve a cotton mill and they say, 'I worked in a cotton mill, lad. Who'd want to preserve that?'"

Even now the cotton remains sewn into Burnley's heart. There are still plenty of women deafened horribly by the constant ker-ponk ker-ponk, but perfectly capable of lip-reading a passer-by from the top deck of a bus. Sam Hanna, now 84, went to work aged 12 in a gaslit weaving-shed in Trafalgar Street: 6 am start, 59 hours a week, wage - two and six-pence. Mr Hanna is a sort of filming Lowry who has spent 50 years recording dying crafts and the living town. On the weaving sheds he remains firmly unnostalgic. "They treated us like animals."

Burnley's cotton industry was probably past its peak when Sam Hanna started work. As early as 1890, millowners anxious for a fast buck were selling-on their old, unwanted looms to India, not stopping to think what the Indians would do with them: undercut Lancashire with infinitely cheaper labour. Meanwhile, the coal seams were, one by one, being too difficult to be worth mining.
"Burnley has declined faster than any other large town in Lancashire because, uniquely, it has lost all its large industries," says the borough historian Roger Frost. When the mills closed so did the firms who made the looms; there were five in town with solid Lancashire names like Pembertons, making solid Lancashire looms. Only one is left, eking out life ingloriously as a jobbing foundry.

You can get over-depressed about Burnley, but it has a tradition of self-reliance, and it is reviving slowly, pulling in new industries (the town's biggest employer is Lucas) and even the fooball team is now respectably and safely in mid-table. But there is a pessimistic view of everything here.
"If a firm comes to Burnley, they come because they're exploiting low wages," says Roger Frost. "Very few of these jobs are in locally owned firms. Come the next depression Burnley will be vulnerable again, I'm convinced of it."

Would Burnley still have more if it still had a winning team ? Daft as it might sound, many people feel much the same about both the football and the Burnley Building Society. That too was one of the top 12 nationally but still homely and rooted. If the dahlia society or the karate club wanted a little sponsorship on its big day, the answer was always yes. The people were loyal in return. In the 80s that was no longer enough. The Burnley began slipping down the league table, as inexorably if not as spectacularly as the soocer team. Eventually it was eaten up. Now it is part of something based in Bradford called the National and Provincial, which sounds like a bank. It is still making a PR effort in Burnley and even paid to reopen the railway to Todmorden. But you wonder whether it will last, PR effort and railway both.

In the end, though, no-one gets passionate about a building society. People do talk in the most graphic terms about the game against Leyton Orient which Burnley had to win to keep in the league. "As near to a religious experience as you can imagine," and "The most emotional experience of my life except the death of my parents."

Jimmy McIlroy, now the deputy sports editor of the Burnley Express ("I know more about local lady darts players than about modern footballers") watched the occasion more cold-eyed than most. He is convinced that Burnley - like the other Lancashire cotton teams, Bolton, Preston and Blackburn - were finished as great clubs when the 20 pound maximum wage was abolished in the 60s. Burnley's decline was the most dramatic, partly because the chairman was immortalised in the over-grandiose concrete of the Bob Lord stand, partly because the club lost its old knack of finding good players cheap and partly because of management which at one stage in the post-Lord era behaved as though it had someone else's Visa card. But you cannot divorce the club's fate completely from the story of its surroundings. Turf Moor is probably the best-appointed workplace for miles around. But it needs a strong town to do it justice as well as a strong team. Maybe a fat dictator would help if he were the right strong man. Robert Maxwell is only a plastic imitation of Bob Lord; it would take Charles Laughton to recreate the role. It will certainly not be played by a director of Lucas or the National and Provincial hunting for the Burnley branch on the balance sheet, and possibly the map. And even a chain of butchers shops is unlikely to have its head office in Burnley these days.

I left Turf Moor rather sadly and went for a pint at the General Scarlett on the Accrington Road. General Scarlett was a Burnley man who led the Charge of the Heavy Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava several hours earlier and much more succesfully than the other, more celebrated charge. By temperament, the British prefer to wallow in heroic defeat than victory; Burnley likes past glories, which is just as well, the present being so disappointing.

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