BlackburnAcid House

The Town

As a decade of decadence ended, and the 1980s limped towards the finish line, post-industrial Blackburn's disenfranchised young people were left with the greatest hangover of all. Unemployment, empty mills, football hooliganism and racial segregation were the hallmarks of many Northern towns. But Blackburn hit back.

The Movement

From the late 80s to the early 90s an underground movement emerged steadily but rapidly — until its sudden crash and burn in 1991 — with a single manifesto: come together… and dance.

The Parties

Breaking and entering into the empty mills and factory spaces, Blackburn's youth illegally gathered in numbers reported to have reached 10,000 and beyond — to find the party, get in the party, and not let the police stop the party. Throw in some class A drugs and an emerging music style called Acid House, and you have one of Blackburn's greatest working class revolutions — interchangeably known as Acid House, Raves, or most commonly to the locals: the Parties.

The Rise

The scene began in legal venues — Crackers and Sett End — before moving into the city's illegal warehouses, where organisers played a constant cat-and-mouse game with the police, and convoys of ravers drove in from Manchester, Harrogate, Wigan and Preston to chase the secret locations. When the party crashed in 1991, the law had caught up: Damo, a raver from Harrogate, became the first person in the UK to be sentenced for attending an illegal gathering.

The Blueprint

The blueprint maps this history onto the imagined footprint of Ewood Mill — the scene's landmark venue — with the era's parties and venues traced across the site: C'est La Vie, the Sett End, the Abattoir, the Slaughterhouse, Whitebirk, the 'Blackburn Hacienda' at Manhattan Heights. It was compiled using content from the Acid House Flashback website — a community archive project by Uncultured Creatives — with thanks to Joe Fossard, Jamie Holman and Alex Zawadzki, and additional research by Ian Mitchell.

The Archive

Thirty years on, and now considered 'heritage', the stories of the people who lived and breathed the scene have been collated into the Flashback project — created in response to the 2019 British Textile Biennial by artist Jamie Holman and creative producer Alex Zawadzki of Uncultured Creatives, in partnership with Super Slow Way, and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Arts Council England and Blackburn with Darwen.

The result is a future-facing archive of unedited, unobstructed memories: over thirty filmed interviews with ravers, DJs, party organisers, the police and local residents, alongside galleries of photographs, flyers, fanzines and record sleeves — a snapshot of the rebellious spirit of 20th century Northern England.