"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion" (Francis Bacon?). Long terraces of soot-blackened workers' houses, flagstone pavements, stone setts (popularly but incorrectly known as cobblestones), gas lighting, a redbrick Victorian church and (dimly visible through the murk) a corner shop. A 19th century Lancashire townscape, perfect and intact when this photograph was taken on 12th December 1969. In the summer of 2004 I revisited this precise spot for the first time since. Never go back they say. The church was still there but, at some point during the intervening years, poor thing, it had woken up to find itself surrounded by low-cost local authority housing of a particularly unlovely kind. Sic transit gloria mundi.