Station
Church & Oswaldtwistle

Church and Oswaldtwistle station serves Church a suburb of Accrington and Oswaltwistle a small village five and a half miles from Blackburn. The station sits comfortably between the two and is served by Northern Rail’s East Lancashire Line.

Oswaldtwistle takes its name from Oswald and twistle. Twistle is an old English word meaning where brooks meet and it is rumoured that St. Oswald, King of Northumbria passed through, giving the area its full title of Oswald’s Twistle, which in time came to be Oswaldtwistle. However, it is more likely derived from the name of an Anglo-Saxon who farmed the land.

Oswaldtwistle, as most East Lancashire towns, was heavily involved in cotton manufacture and featured in the power loom riots of 1826 when local cotton mills were attacked in riots that lasted four days. The famous Oswaldtwistle Mills shopping outlet, based in Moscow Mill, is situated within five minutes walk of the station.

The village centre contains a range of shops and boasts a Civic Theatre which holds over four hundred people. Ryddings Park donated to the town in 1909 is also worth a visit. Foxhall bank nature reserve in the valley of Tinker Brook can be found half a mile south west of the station. This project created and established around an old industrial dye works has brought wildlife into the area in particular to the old lodge area.

Church is a suburb of Accrington and is a typical Lancashire mill town although several large areas of former terraced houses are being demolished and redeveloped as part of Hyndburn’s Elevate project. Local industries here at the turn of the century included coal mining, quarrying, cotton spinning and pottery manufacture.

Ethel Carnie Holdsworth

Ethel Carnie was born on New Years Day 1886 into a weaving family in Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire. When she was six years old, her parents moved to the growing textile town of Great Harwood, near Blackburn. She started part-time work at Delph Road Mill in Great Harwood at aged eleven and was in full-time employment at St. Lawrence Mill from thirteen. In her later articles for the Woman Worker, she described her experience as “slavery”.

Huckleberry Films, a local award winning Lancashire based creative film company have made a short animated film about her life and this can be seen on the the link below:

Address

Church & Oswaldtwistle Station
Market Street
Church
Accrington
Lancashire
BB5 0DP

Grid Reference

SD 743283 – for a map visit www.streetmap.co.uk and enter the grid reference.

Operator

Northern (DOHL)

Facilities

+  Unstaffed station
+  Ticket Vending Machine
+  Hourly service to Preston and Colne
+  Waiting shelters
+  Additional seating on platforms
+  Long Line Public Address
+  CCTV

Other Information

+  Bus stops on Market Street outside station entrance (services 1, 1A, 1B, 5, 5A, 6, 7, 8, 8A & 61)  – click here for bus timetables
+  Friends of Station – visit communityraillancashire.co.uk/station-adoption/ for more details
+  CRP branded notice boards
+  Oswaldtwistle Mills is five minutes walk from the station – click here for more information
+  Access to Leeds Liverpool canal is approximately 10 minutes walk from the station – click here for more details