East Lancashire Cablevision Ltd
Before Virgin Media there was NTL and Telewest; before NTL there was Cable & Wireless Communications; before Cable & Wireless Communications there was NYNEX, and before NYNEX there was a little group called Maclean Hunter Cable TV. Maclean Hunter’s first UK cable TV franchise was East Lancashire Cablevision Ltd, a Blackburn based company. In November 1989 after only six months of building a network the service was launched. Quoting from the Book of Proverbs the chairman of the company switched it on with the quote ‘Where there is no vision the people perish’.
East Lancs Cable not only launched the first broadband cable TV service in the North of England but also achieved a number of other firsts including the launch of the UK’s first local community TV service.