Bolton Property For Sale and Rent
Bolton is a busy Lancashire industrial town. There
is an imposing town hall in Classical style by William Hill,
1873, and the civic centre houses an aquarium, the museum and
the art gallery. Museum collections include geology, botany,
zoology, ornithology, archaeology and an Egyptian collection.
The art gallery
has English paintings, English 18th-cent. pottery, and English
and European sculpture with an Epstein collection. Bolton's
history goes back to before the Conquest but the town became
prominent with the development of the cotton industry.
It has
grown into one of the largest boroughs in Lancashire, although
many old mills are now devoted to other manufactures. During the
Civil War the town was the scene of a massacre committed by
Royalists, and James Stanley, Earl of Derby was beheaded in retaliation by Cromwell. In one of the ancient streets, Churchgate, is Ye Old Man and Scythe, dated 1251, with a statement that in this
hostelry Stanley passed his last few hours before execution. At a cottage in
Firwood Fold, off Crompton Way on the north-east edge of Bolton, is the
birthplace of Samuel Crompton, the inventor of the spinning-mule.
Crompton's tomb is in the parish churchyard.
The town was also the birthplace of William Hesketh Lever (1851-1925), who
became the 1st Viscount Leverhulme. Lever, whose father was a Bolton grocer,
began to make soap at Wigan in 1886. He founded Lever Brothers (which became
Unilever Ltd after his death) and his Sunlight Soap became well known. Lever
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