10 Absolute Worst Places To Live in Lancashire transcript

Lancashire built more of Britain's industrial revolution than almost anywhere else in the country. Today, the same county holds England's single most deprived town. It's third most deprived. And a neighborhood ranked in the worst 1% nationally. All inside one set of county lines. We're counting down 10 places here that go from a seaside resort with the lowest life expectancy for men anywhere in the UK to a valley that got flooded on purpose where a church had to be dug up [music] and moved stone by stone before the water came.

To a new town [music] estate where one mother says she can spot a future gang member by the age of nine. Stick around for number one because that's a hospital the government investigated and condemned in its own official report. And the new houses going up on its old grounds are being built around a graveyard >> [music] >> nobody ever moved. Lancashire powered one of the engines of the industrial revolution. Textiles, coal, engineering, and shipping all ran through this county at once.

And for a while it looked like that would never stop. It did stop and the official numbers on what came after are hard to argue with. >> [music] >> Blackpool tops the national rankings for deprivation outright. Worse off than every other local authority in England. Burnley sits third worst nationally. A sharp fall from eighth place just a few years earlier, Mike. Which means the slide is recent. >> [music] >> And it's still happening.

In West Lancashire, more than half of Skelmersdale's neighborhoods rank in the most deprived fifth of the entire country. This isn't one bad year showing up in a spreadsheet. Government figures show that around 88% of the neighborhoods ranked most deprived in 2019 were already ranked most deprived back in 2015. Which means the same places tend to stay stuck at the bottom year after year. Unless something forces a change.

None of that's an accident. And none of it's a joke about people who happen to live somewhere. Every place on this list has a name, a date, and a reason [music] attached to its decline. Whether that reason is a mill that shut, a hospital scandal that made national headlines, or an entire valley put under water on purpose. A few entries on this list aren't really places to live anymore at all. Nobody lives in them. That's exactly why they're on this list.

Each one proves what an industry, an institution, or a decision on paper can do to a place once the people who built it are gone. Padiham sits on the River Calder inside the borough of Burnley. And >> [music] >> its name is older than almost anything else on this list. It comes from the Anglo-Saxon [music] for Padda's homestead. And the first name tenant on record is a man called Gilbert de Padiham, who held the land as the town's only free tenant back in 1258.

By 1294, records had started [music] calling the settlement Padingham. Over the centuries that followed, coal and weaving turned it into a working town like dozens of others across the county. By the early 1900s, Padiham had 20 cotton mills running at once. Victoria Mill on Ightenhill Street, built in the 1850s and extended in 1873, was the biggest and best built of all of them. And it's one of the only mills still standing today.

It's flats now, not looms. The town's population peaked around 1921 at close to 14,000 people. By the early 1960s, it had dropped to 10,000. And by the 2001 census, it sat at 8,998 as the county's cotton and coal industries collapsed underneath it, one closure after another. Padiham's last big employer traded for years [music] under names like Main Gas Appliances, Myers and Thorn EMI before ending up as Baxi. In March 2007, Baxi shut its Padiham factory for good.

And 500 people lost their jobs in a single announcement. After union reps and council leaders [music] failed to talk the company into keeping any part of the line running, the jobs never came back. Padiham is still there. Still carrying the name of a man who probably never imagined it as anything more than a homestead by a river. The town outlived its founder, its mills, its coal, and its last factory. What is left is a name on a map attached to a place that ran out of industries to lose.

Padiham lost its industry slowly, decade by decade, one factory at a time. Number nine on this list lost its name to a legend before it ever lost anything real. On a certain kind of January night when there's a full moon and the wind is up, people in the villages near Colne still tell you about the horseman. He is said to be one of the Cunliffe family, a squire who rode home early from a fox hunt and found his wife with another man.

What happens next depends on who is telling it, but every version ends the same way. He kills her and and the story never lets either of them go. The Cunliffes built Wycoller Hall, the ruined manor at the center of the story. Their family line is recorded as ending with the death of Henry Owen Cunliffe in 1819. Whether that date connects to the horseman legend or is simply a coincidence of timing, nobody can say for certain.

[music] And the surviving record doesn't settle it either way. What is certain is what is left of the building itself. Whycoller Hall is roofless now, its walls open to the weather. And the site carries at least two other ghost stories alongside the horseman. >> [music] >> There's a woman known as the lady in black, sometimes called black Bess, said to be either the murdered wife or [music] a Cunliffe widow who drowned at sea.

And there's a phantom coach said to still race up to the hall's door on certain nights. None of this is verified in any historical sense. It shouldn't be treated as fact the way the rest of this list is. Walk the ruins, cross the old clapper bridges over Whycoller Beck, and you'll find the moorland weather around the site doesn't need the ghost stories to feel emptied out. The stone was doing that on its own long before anyone attached a horseman to it.

Whycoller lost a family line to a story nobody can prove. The next entry on this list lost an entire village. And there's no story to it at all, just a flood on a specific day done on purpose. Deep in the forest of Bowland in the Dalehead Valley, a hamlet called Stocks in Bowland once stood. It's first recorded in 1234, back when it amounted to little more than a handful of farms. By 1900 it had grown into three cottages, a smithy, and an inn called The Traveler's Rest, which had previously gone by the name of the New Inn.

It stayed small and settled for centuries. At the center of it all stood the village church, St. James. In 1932 that changed. Engineers flooded the valley on purpose to build Stocks Reservoir. And everything the community had built over nearly 700 years went underwater. Nobody simply abandoned St. James' Church. Workers dismantled it stone by stone and rebuilt it on higher ground. And the dead in its churchyard were dug up and reburied in a new cemetery before the water came.

A temporary construction village called Hollins went up to house the more than 500 men who built the dam. And Hollins itself no longer exists, either. Prince George opened the finished reservoir on the 5th of July, 1932. Families with ties to the original Dalehead community still bury their dead in that same relocated cemetery today. Nearly a full century after the valley went under. Nobody died here. And no scandal, fire, or collapse forced anyone out.

A decision made on paper somewhere did the forcing instead. And the community it fell on never got a say in it. That's Lancashire's version of a clearance. Just with water instead of soldiers [music] doing the work. Stocks in Bowland lost its homes to water over the course of one summer. Number seven on this list lost its future to the sea. One boat at a time over three decades, John Worthington is 59 years old. He's one of the last handful of working fishermen left in Fleetwood.

Standing on docks that once held around 120 trawlers at a time. In the 1950s and 60s, Fleetwood's fishing industry directly employed around 11,000 people. With roughly a third of the town's entire population tied to it indirectly through processing, supply, and the docks themselves. The Cod Wars of the 1970s were the beginning of the end. Iceland restricted British trawlers from fishing in its waters. And the industry that had built Fleetwood started losing the grounds it depended on.

A government decommissioning scheme in the 1990s paid many remaining fishermen [music] to sell their boats outright as part of an effort to protect what was left of the fish stocks. The last deep-sea trawler left Fleetwood in 1982 and it never really had a successor. Fish processing in the town today employs around 600 people, but most of the fish now arrives by road, trucked in from other ports rather than pulled from local [music] water.

There's a proposed fish park planned for a currently empty dock site. It may eventually bring some of that work back. For now, the gap between a historic fish market that once ran 1,000 yd long and today's 100 yd of activity says everything the statistics don't need to. Worthington is still out there working, one of the very few people left doing a job that, [music] on paper, shouldn't exist here anymore. Fleetwood lost its boats gradually across 30 years.

Number six on this list lost a 15-year-old boy >> [music] >> in about 4 minutes at around 9:00 in the evening on the 29th of June on a footbridge over Digmoor Road in Skelmersdale. 28-year-old Filipe Figueiredo stabbed 15-year-old Dylan Bragger at least 23 times in the head, neck, chest, back, and abdomen. Bragger didn't survive. A jury later found Figueiredo guilty of his murder. Planners built Skelmersdale after the Second World War as a new town, designed to absorb overspill population from Liverpool and the wider Merseyside area, and give families a fresh start outside the city.

Digmoor, the ward where Bragger died, takes its name from a hamlet that existed on the site long before anyone planned the new town around it. It's now one of several wards that make up Skelmersdale. It carries a distinction the town's planners never intended. 14 of Skelmersdale's 23 neighborhoods rank inside the most deprived 20% of areas in the entire country against a figure of 29% for West Lancashire as a whole. And the Digmoor estate specifically has been ranked among the single most deprived 1% of neighborhoods in England.

On the Channel 4 documentary Grayson Perry: All Man, one Digmoor mother said she could already tell by the age of nine which local children were likely to end up in a gang. She admitted she had caught her own son wanting to carry a knife. A new town built to give people a second chance is now defined nationally by a stabbing, a knife, and a set of deprivation statistics that haven't moved in the right direction. If this list is doing its job so far, drop a thumbs up right now because the next entry is a house fire on an ordinary street that turned out to be hiding something a lot worse than the fire itself.

On the 30th of September 2020, Dr. Saman Mir Sacharvi and her 14-year-old daughter, Vian Mangrio, were murdered at their home on Colne Road in Burnley. Shabaz Khan pleaded guilty to both killings. Afterward, he set both bodies alight in an apparent attempt to cover up what he had done. Burnley rose to prominence in the 19th century as a cotton weaving powerhouse. One of dozens of Lancashire towns whose entire economy sat on a handful of industries.

By the 2019 index of multiple deprivation, it ranked the third most deprived local authority out of 296 areas in England. A fall from eighth place in the 2015 index. That isn't a town stabilizing after a hard decade. That's a town getting worse on the official numbers is um while everyone was still calling it recovering. Burnley's own authority monitoring report for 2024 and 2025 recorded 10,016 crimes, not counting fraud, in the year up to the 31st of March 2025.

A rate of just over 100 crimes for every thousand people in the borough. That figure is down slightly from the year before and the council [music] points to it as a sign of things improving. A small year-on-year dip hasn't been enough to shift Burnley's national ranking. The same report describes what it calls deep pockets of deprivation in some of Burnley's inner urban wards, pointing to high crime, poor quality housing, fuel poverty, and health problems that run deep, all sitting only a short drive from some of the borough's more affluent suburbs and villages.

Burnley's numbers got worse on paper year after year. While nobody murdered anyone over spreadsheet data. The next entry on this list didn't decline on paper at all. A man died there because a roller coaster didn't stop when it should have. In October 2001, an engineer named Harry Matthews, 59 years old, was carrying out maintenance on the Gauntlet roller coaster at Camelot Theme Park in Charnock Richard, near Chorley, when one of the ride's carriages struck and killed him.

The park's operator, Prime Resorts Limited, later took a 40,000 pound fine over his death. It also paid a further £20,000 in costs. A local entrepreneur named John Rigby created Camelot itself. After he bought the 140-acre Park Hall estate near Chorley in February 1973 for £210,000. The park opened in 1983. Built entirely around the legend of King Arthur. With a backstory claiming that Sir Lancelot's own parents had once fled >> [music] >> to Lancashire from enemies in France.

For years it drew families in with jousting shows, a log flume, and a growing lineup of rides. One of those rides would eventually kill the man maintaining it. Visitor numbers declined steadily through the 2000s. Camelot closed for good on the 2nd of September 2012. Since then, the site has sat exactly the way abandoned theme parks tend to sit. Graffiti spreading [music] across the walls, rust taking the rides, and grass pushing up through what used to be a car park.

Look at photos taken since closure and you'll find the roller coasters [music] rusting in place, frozen mid-track. Alongside everything else Rigby built. In recent years, the site has been repurposed [music] for horror-themed events. Charging visitors to walk through the same decay that was once a working family attraction. Property developers have circled the land, too. Their plans for housing would put the whole park, roller coaster and all, underneath new streets.

A theme park built on a medieval legend about knights and honor is now in reality more dangerous and more abandoned [music] than the story it was ever selling. Camelot's death happened on a ride nobody was supposed to be standing [music] near. Number three on this list is a death that happened to a 10-year-old boy in a hotel lobby on a on a family holiday. On the 3rd of September, 2023, 10-year-old Jack Piper Sheach spent a holiday at Tiffany's Hotel on Blackpool's Promenade with his mother, aunt, and grandmother when he was electrocuted in the hotel's reception area.

He died in hospital 4 days later. A coroner later confirmed the cause of death. And the hotel eventually paid a £120,000 fine over the incident. Years after a family had already lost a child on an ordinary week away by the sea. Blackpool built its entire identity on being the great working-class seaside resort of the north. Built around the tower, the illuminations, and the promise of a cheap, safe family holiday within reach of anyone.

That promise sits directly on top of the worst deprivation numbers in the country. Blackpool is ranked the single most deprived local authority in all of England on multiple measures of the index of multiple deprivation. And it has held that ranking for years running across multiple reports in a row. Men here have the lowest life expectancy anywhere in the UK at just 73 years old, sir. And the town has the highest rate of what public health researchers now call deaths of despair anywhere in England.

Almost two out of every five adults in Blackpool live in one of the 10% most income-deprived areas in the entire country. And just over a quarter live in one of the 10% most employment-deprived areas nationally. A resort built on the promise of a safe family holiday is still selling exactly that promise today. While carrying the worst deprivation statistics in England behind it. Families keep arriving for the Illuminations and the pier.

The numbers arrive first. And they never really left. Blackpool's damage happened in an afternoon in 2023. And the numbers around it are current and still being counted. The next entry happened in 1612. And 400 years later, Lancashire still hasn't fully put it [music] down. On March 21st, 1612, in the woods near Pendle Hill, a teenage girl named Alison Device asked a traveling peddler called John Law for some metal pins.

He refused her. She cursed him for it, and shortly afterward Law suffered what is now believed to have been a stroke. He blamed the curse come, and Alison Device was arrested. What started as one argument over pins spiraled quickly into something much larger. >> [music] >> The accusations pulled in Alison's grandmother, Elizabeth Southerns, known locally as Old Demdike, along with a rival family led by Anne Whittle, known as Old Chattox, whose feud with the Devices stretched back to a break-in at the Devices' home, Malkin Tower, over a decade earlier.

On the 10th of April, friends and family of both accused families gathered at Malkin Tower, allegedly to plot a prison break and to plan curses against the local authorities investigating them. In August 1612, the accused were marched to Lancaster Castle to stand trial under conditions stacked heavily against them. Built on hearsay, superstition, and old local rivalries, rather than any evidence that would hold [music] up today. 10 people connected to the Pendle area were found guilty and hanged, including Alizon Device herself and Old Chattox.

Old Demdike never made it to trial. She died in jail first, worn down by age and the conditions she was held in. An old woman convicted of nothing except outliving the chance [music] to defend herself. More than 400 years later, Pendle Hill and the village of Newchurch in Pendle >> [music] >> still draw visitors. They walk the Pendle Witch Trail, book ghost hunts, and tour the ruins connected [music] to Malkin Tower and Lancaster Castle.

Newchurch itself has its own smaller, more recent stories layered on top of the trial. Reported sightings at the Boar's Head Pub, unexplained footsteps [music] and figures at a local farm, and more recent accounts from the parish church that shares the village's name. None of that carries the weight of an actual death sentence. It should be treated as folklore, not fact. Looked at plainly, the trial itself is [music] a documented 17th century miscarriage of justice that 10 people died for, now sold back to tourists four centuries later as entertainment.

Pendle lost [music] 10 people to a single trial built on rumor. Number one on this list has an official government report into what happened there, and the report is worse than the rumors ever were. Whittingham opened on the 1st of April, 1873, near [music] Preston, under the name of the Fourth Lancashire County Asylum. A Manchester architect named Henry Littler designed it. Before it officially opened, 115 patients were sent ahead from Prestwich [music] Asylum to help prepare the site for the people who would follow them.

It opened with room for 1,100 patients, along with its own Anglican and Catholic churches and a recreation hall built onto the grounds. The hospital grew steadily after that. It became the largest mental hospital in the whole of Britain. >> [music] >> And it was there that doctors pioneered the use of electroencephalograms. The machines now used everywhere to read electrical activity in the brain. For close to a century it functioned as a self-contained world.

Housing thousands of patients [music] behind its own walls. In 1969 allegations of ill-treatment, fraud and mismanagement at Whittingham were made in confidence to hospital officials. Triggering a special financial audit and a police investigation. A government inquiry followed led by Sir Robert Payne. And its report published in 1972 didn't soften anything. [music] It documented patients being dragged across floors by their hair.

Punched and locked under staircases. >> [music] >> It described a punishment known among staff as the wet towel treatment. In which staff twisted a wet towel around a patient's neck until they lost consciousness. [music] Wards sat understaffed and infested with cockroaches. Financial audits turned up money meant for patients that nobody ever accounted for. One patient died as a direct result of the ill-treatment documented in the case.

A court later convicted a nurse of manslaughter over that single death. And the conviction led to public calls for the entire hospital management committee to resign. The Payne report summed up what investigators found in four words. Brutality. Dishonesty. Muddle. And abuse. The last long-stay patients were moved back into the community by 1995. [music] Whittingham Hospital closed that same year. The building sat empty after that, drawing in urban explorers who slipped past private security to walk through wards that hadn't held a patient in years.

The part that rarely makes it into the story people already know is what [music] happened to the grounds afterward. Almost all of the hospital's remaining buildings have now come down after the council renewed planning permission for the site in 2014 to make way for a new housing development of 650 homes. St. John's Church and its graveyard, however, were never moved. >> [music] >> Walk the estate today and the headstones are still standing exactly where they always stood, sitting in the middle of what is becoming an ordinary housing estate >> [music] >> with new families moving in around graves that predate every one of the scandals this hospital is actually known [music] for.

Lancashire has plenty of ruins. What it doesn't have very often is a government report with a hospital's name on it, sitting in the historical record next to a planning permission notice for new family homes on the very same ground. The graveyard is still there. So is everything the report described. Only one of the two ever got built over. >> [music]