an urban district in the Clitheroe parliamentary division of Lancashire, England, 3 m. W. by N. of Burnley by the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway. Pop. (1901), 12,205. It lies in a wild and dreary district on the precipitous banks of the Calder. It possesses large cotton mills, and quarries and coalmines are worked in the immediate neighbourhood. The church of St Leonard, founded before 1451, was frequently altered before it was rebuilt in1866-1868in the Perpendicular style. Padiham in 1251 was a manor in the possession of Edmund de Lacy.