Blackburn Bus Station has lived up to expectations since its opening in May 2016. Compared to the cold and windy Boulevard, our new bus station is clean and modern with real time information and helpful staff on hand.
Unfortunately there is one thing they have done which hasn’t gone down well with everybody. This is their erection of a Hollywood style Blackburn sign on Penny Street. What has upset people is its letter ‘n’, at the end of ‘Blackburn’, being written in lower case. Whereas the rest of our town’s name is in upper case letters.
For those with a keen eye, letters advertising the Mall’s ‘Next’ store can be spotted high above our bus station. Like the bus station’s Blackburn sign, their letters are also all in white. But they share only one letter in their respective names. This is the letter ‘n’, which both of them have in its lower case – albeit in different fonts.
Could this be a coincidence, or did their letters come in one job lot? Or could it be their suppliers had run out of the letter ‘n’ in this sign’s font and were sent two capital ‘U’s instead? A bit of improvisation may have been put into action here and one of these ‘U’s may have been turned upside down and used to finish off the Blackburn name.
It’s quite appropriate that our new bus station sign is just across the road from Thwaites’ closed Fleece pub. This pub is just below another well-known sign, also belonging to Blackburn’s local brewery. Its sign has been known to raise a few eyebrows and even turned faces red on one particular occasion. If this pub was open its landlord would probably say to the red-faced sign designer: “We don’t serve your type in here.”
But perhaps our mysterious lower case letter ‘n’ is really a master stroke of genius from the sign designer after all. Following so many lengthy delays in building our new bus station and subsequent transport cutbacks, what better a subject for discussion than this alternative version of the Blackburn End?
It deflects attention away from problems affecting our bus station and transport problems in general. This gives us something unusual to moan about. We should class ourselves lucky they didn’t send us a small ‘r’ to go with their ‘n’. Shoved together, this sign would have attracted even more hilarity to our new bus station.