(Continued.)
The majority of structures are built in locally quarried gritstone, however (Whalley nd). Of
all pre-1914 built structures, 92% were built using gritstone and only 8% in brick (Atkinson
1972, 8). The uses of gritstone vary from ashlared masonry, as utilised in corporate
buildings, to roughly hewn blocks for most residential buildings. Most of the earlier
domestic and former agricultural structures have uncoursed rubble side walls with
watershot front and rear elevations. Virtually all of the surviving vernacular style buildings
pre-dating 1840 have watershot stone frontages. Some such buildings built between 1840
and 1850 also have this feature, but after 1850 this building method appears to have
ceased in Accrington. Post-1850 working-class housing and utilitarian structures, like the
later byelaw housing, tends to have coursed rubble walls
Despite a century of industrial pollution followed by often misguided attempts to clean
buildings of their smoke blackening, Accrington’s stone buildings show remarkably little
sign of erosion. The hard-wearing nature of the local stone, its ubiquity of occurrence and
its versatility for use in various forms made it the preferred choice for local building. In
addition, gritstone was the traditionally used material perhaps best suited to parochial
conservative tastes (Atkinson 1972, 69). By contrast, the locally made brick may have
been primarily for export to towns less well-resourced with workable building stone, and to
larger urban centres more open to progressive architectural tastes (Atkinson 1972, 70).
Roofs were, at least originally, covered in sandstone flags. Welsh slate was imported for
use in some buildings, but many roofs today have had such materials replaced with lighter
and now less expensive substitutes
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