BB1 5PD Blackburn with Darwen

Live postcode, introduced January 1980. Ward: Little Harwood & Whitebirk. Region: North West.

Streets

Council tax

What each band costs in Blackburn with Darwen in 2026-27: Band D £2,455 a year on average, including the police, fire and any county and parish charges.

ABCDEFGH
£1,637£1,910£2,182£2,455£3,001£3,547£4,092£4,911

Homes by band in the neighbourhood around this postcode: most are in band A (80% of about 710 homes).

Sources: Valuation Office Agency, Council Tax: stock of properties, homes at 31 March 2026 (counts rounded to the nearest 10), for the neighbourhood (census area of about 700 homes) around it, not just this postcode; Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, council tax levels 2026-27. Bands are charged as fixed shares of Band D; the actual bill depends on the parish and on discounts such as the single-person discount. Check a home's own band with the official council tax band checker.

Planning and heritage

  • Conservation area: no postcode centre in this postcode is in one.
  • Listed buildings within 100 m of this postcode: 1.
  • Article 4 direction (removing permitted development rights): none recorded, though not every council has published theirs.
  • Tree preservation orders: none recorded, though not every council has published theirs.
  • Green belt: no.

Listed buildings

Source: planning.data.gov.uk (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government), compiled from councils and, for listed buildings, Historic England's National Heritage List. Conservation areas, Article 4 directions, tree preservation areas and the green belt are checked at each postcode's centre. Listed buildings and protected trees are counted within 100 m of this postcode. Councils publish Article 4 directions, tree preservation orders and brownfield registers to different standards, and some not yet. Planning applications are not here: there is no national open record of them yet.

Flood risk

Rivers, the sea or surface water: in this postcode, 6 addresses are in areas at high risk, 5 at medium risk and 15 at low risk. Each address counts once, at the higher of its rivers-and-sea and surface-water risk.

Rivers and the sea alone: of the 28 homes the Environment Agency counts, 0 are in areas at high risk, 0 medium, 10 low and 1 very low.

High: 3.3% (1 in 30) or more chance of flooding a year. Medium: 1% to 3.3%. Low: 0.1% to 1%. Very low: under 0.1%. The rivers and sea figures allow for flood defences. Counts cover whole postcodes, which can include other streets.

Flood zone for planning: the postcode centre is in flood zone 2. Zone 2 is between 0.1% and 1% a year from rivers (0.1% and 0.5% from the sea), ignoring defences.

Sources: Environment Agency Flood risk: postcode search tool data (loaded 29 October 2026), Risk of Flooding from Rivers and Sea: postcodes in areas at risk (loaded 29 October 2026) and Flood Map for Planning (loaded 28 October 2026). Flood zones are checked at each postcode's centre point. These are models of areas, which their publishers say are not suitable for showing whether an individual property is at risk, and they do not cover flooding from sewers or drains. Check an address on the official long-term flood risk service.

Broadband

Superfast 100%, ultrafast 100%, gigabit 100% of premises; 0% cannot get 10 Mbit/s. Ofcom Connected Nations, data as at January 2026.

Getting around

Sources: Department for Transport, NaPTAN (every public transport stop), as at 31 October 2026; Office of Rail and Road, Estimates of station usage 2024–25 (which stations are on the National Rail network, and their journeys: entries and exits in the year to March); OurAirports (public domain, kept by volunteers); car parks and charging points from Overture Maps Foundation, release 2026-10-21.0, which gathers business listings from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and others: not an official register, so some will be missing, private or out of date. Distances are straight lines from the postcode's centre, not routes, and say nothing about how often anything runs. Stations opened since the end of ORR's year appear when ORR publishes the next one, each December; heritage railways are left out.

NearestDistance
Railway stationsBlackburn 1.3 million journeys in 2024–251.7 km
Ramsgreave and Wilpshire 92,000 journeys in 2024–252.4 km
Rishton 41,000 journeys in 2024–253.0 km
Bus stops19 stops within 400 m, 49 within 800 m; nearest Rydal Road Little Harwood40 m
Bus or coach stationBus Station Blackburn Town Centre1.6 km
Car parksNcp National Car Parks Blackburn, Penny Street1.4 km
EV charging points1 within 1.6 km; nearest evyve Charging Station1.2 km
Airport with scheduled flightsManchester Airport MAN47.3 km

Local services

Sources: NHS Organisation Data Service, as at 31 October 2026: GP practices, community pharmacies and dental practices with an NHS contract, open now, each placed at the centre of its postcode; hospitals are NHS trust and Welsh health board sites named as hospitals, and may not have an emergency department. Police stations and cash machines from Overture Maps Foundation, release 2026-10-21.0, which gathers business listings: not an official register, so some will be missing or out of date. Distances are straight lines from the postcode's centre. Nothing here says whether a practice is taking new patients or a dentist new NHS patients.

NearestDistance
GP surgeries7 practices within 1.6 km; nearest Little Harwood Health Centre190 m
Pharmacies9 pharmacies within 1.6 km; nearest Cohens Chemist170 m
NHS dentists4 practices within 1.6 km; nearest 85 91 Accrington Road (Dental Surgery)1.4 km
HospitalRoyal Blackburn Hospital2.7 km
Police stationLancashire Constabulary Eastern Division910 m
Cash machines1 machines within 800 m; nearest ATM90 m

Parks and green space

Source: Ordnance Survey, OS Open Greenspace, April 2026: public parks and gardens, play spaces, playing fields and allotments, with their entrances. Distances are straight lines from the postcode's centre to a site's nearest entrance (or its edge where none is recorded), not walking routes; sizes are the area OS maps for each site. Some sites, such as school playing fields, may not be open to the public.

NearestDistance
Park or garden1 within 800 m; nearest Unnamed 690 m²180 m
Play area6 within 800 m; nearest Unnamed 250 m²210 m
Playing field1 within 800 m; nearest Unnamed 1.0 ha190 m
Allotments2 within 800 m; nearest Broadfold Allotments 1.6 ha130 m

Within 800 m: 1 park or garden, 0.1 hectares in all.

Air quality

Source: Defra, modelled background air pollution, annual means for 2024, for the 1 km square that holds the postcode's centre. These are background levels, away from the kerb: beside a busy road nitrogen dioxide in particular can be several times higher. UK limits are the legal annual limits for England and Wales; the World Health Organization's 2021 guidelines are much stricter, and most towns and cities are above them.

Annual means in µg/m³ (micrograms per cubic metre of air)
PollutantHereUK limitWHO guideline
Nitrogen dioxide (NO2)9.24010
Fine particles (PM2.5)6.3205
Particles (PM10)9.74015

All three are within the UK legal limits; PM2.5 is above the WHO guideline, as in most towns and cities.

Road and rail noise

Source: Defra, strategic noise mapping Round 4 (England), modelled for 2021 and published in December 2023: Lden, the average sound level over a whole day with extra weight for the evening and night, on a 10 m grid, read at each address. These are models of traffic on the roads and railways, not measurements; they leave out aircraft, industry and neighbours, and a room at the back of a house is often much quieter than the front. The World Health Organization's guidelines are 53 dB for road traffic and 54 dB for railways.

Noise figures are still being loaded.

People and work

Source: ONS Census 2021, taken on 21 March 2021, for the Output Area (a small census area of about 125 households) that this postcode is in: 422 residents in 126 households. The census was taken during a lockdown, so working from home is high and travel to work low compared with now. ONS swaps a few records between neighbouring areas and adds small amounts of noise to counts to protect privacy, so small differences mean little. Industry is not published for areas this small.

Who lives here

Around this postcodeEngland
Median age3140
Children under 1521%17%
Aged 65 and over8%18%

Homes

Around this postcodeEngland
Owned (outright or with a mortgage)71%61%
Owned outright51%33%
Shared ownership0%1%
Social rented0%17%
Private rented29%21%

Work and commuting

Around this postcodeEngland
Adults (16 and over) in work48%57%
Unemployment (of those working or looking for work)11%6%
Retired (of adults)8%22%
Long-term sick or disabled (of adults)5%4%
Work mainly from home (of those in work)18%32%
Travel to work by car or van57%48%
By train, Underground, metro or tram0%4%
By any public transport, including bus1%8%
On foot or by bicycle16%10%
Work within 10 km of home (of those who travel to work)92%65%
Work 30 km or more away3%8%

Education and languages

Around this postcodeEngland
Degree or other higher qualification, Level 4+ (of adults)22%34%
No qualifications34%18%
Apprenticeship as highest qualification1%5%
Main language English (aged 3 and over)76%91%
Cannot speak English well or at all9%2%

Deprivation

The neighbourhood around this postcode is in decile 2 of 10 on the English Indices of Deprivation 2025, where 1 is the most deprived tenth of England's 33,755 neighbourhoods and 10 the least.

Source: English Indices of Deprivation 2025 (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government), by LSOA (about 1,500 people), through the ONS Postcode Directory. The index combines income, employment, health, education, crime, housing and living environment; it ranks areas against each other and does not describe any one household. Ranks in England and Wales are worked out separately and cannot be compared.

The full dossier for this postcode's main street is on Whalley Old Road.