Beardwood Mansion
The building seen here being demolished in the Blackburn Times of October 1936 stood for over a century on the site now occupied by Beardwood Drive, which follows the broad path of the driveway to the house. It sat in six acres of gardens containing a coach-house, servants' cottages, stables, a Summer house, a dairy, a shippon barn and a well. The house itself included eleven bedrooms.
At first its owner was a Blackburn lawyer called Henry Hargreaves, but later in the Nineteenth century it was bought by Mayor of Blackburn and later MP for Darwen Sir John Rutherford. Rutherford had made his money from a partnership in Shaw's brewery on Salford, and spent it on horseracing amongst other sporting pursuits. He died in 1932, and the site was sold for the development of the 'garden city' suburban homes now there. Only an outhouse survived, as the garage of a new house.
Matthew Cole
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