Some good news is Blackburn’s Brown Cow pub on Livesey Branch Road reopening. But it seems to have caused controversy amongst locals after this pub’s parent group said their hostelry was based in Blackburn’s Feniscowles district and not the Livesey part of town.
This pub is owned by Stonegate Group, which is one of Britain’s largest pub chains. Their head office is in Solihull, but they are registered in the Cayman Islands. Stonegate is owned by venture capitalists TDR Capital who are based in London. TDR also own 50% of EG Group, in partnership with Blackburn’s Issa Brothers. They are also in the same consortium, along with the Issa’s, which recently bought control of ASDA.
As regards Blackburn’s Brown Cow, Stonegate are calling it a Craft Union pub. This sounds like music to the ears of us die-hard trade union members. But an image of skilled electricians, plumbers and engineers working behind the Brown Cow’s bar is a bit fanciful. It’s debatable whether Stonegate even recognises trade unions in this industry. They certainly didn’t have any dealings with the cartographer’s union when they decided their pub’s address was in Feniscowles.
Harking back to a previous identity problem following boundary changes in 1974. Cherry Tree and Feniscowles, which came under the old Chorley Rural District, became part of Blackburn. Unfortunately this resulted in Livesey Branch Road having houses along it with the same door numbers as a legacy of this road originally being in two separate boroughs.
Perhaps there could be an answer to this mystery of why the Brown Cow has been placed in Feniscowles after all. This may be down to Feniscowles actually having a cow in its name – immediately after Fenis. No doubt Stonegate are glad our town is Blackburn and not Scunthorpe. This latter town gave rise to the ‘Scunthorpe Problem’ of 1996 which AOL’s profanity filter prevented residents from this Lincolnshire town creating accounts with them due to a substring containing an obscene word. Something similar also happened to Google’s SafeSearch filter with the same town.
On the bright side, at least we can breathe a sigh of relief that we could never suffer any confusion with Blackburn’s other Feniscowles pub at the top end of Livesey Branch Road – the Feildens Arms. This is down to it not having an apostrophe like its namesake a few miles due north in Mellor Brook. What a handy solution!
