RUSSIAN spies drew up detailed maps of East Lancashire in readiness for a Soviet invasion on Britain.

Newly-released maps created during the Cold War show the KGB studied Blackburn, Burnley and Padiham.

The maps were to prepare communist forces for a tank invasion by detailing things such as the width of roads and the height of bridges.

Among the features identified were government and administrative buildings, military and industrial sites; radio and telephone stations; fireproof buildings and factories.

Historians believe 50,000 cartographers were based in Moscow to create maps of English towns and cities from spies on the ground and aerial reconnaissance.

Maps of countries throughout the world were found in abandoned train carriages in Latvia and Estonia after the fall of the USSR in 1991.

To this day, no one knows if the Russians left them behind by accident or whether locals on the ground diverted the trains.

Local companies in Latvia and Estonia have been selling the maps ever since.

The maps have been published on the internet by the Landmark Information Group, after it purchased them from a US firm, East View Cartographics.

But Steve Caunce, senior lecturer in history at the University of Central Lancashire, said East Lancashire was unlikely to have been on the priority list of targets.

He said: "This was the period when intelligence communities had an overkill attitude but I can't see how anything in the East Lancashire area would be a potential flashpoint where they would initiative activity.

"The only thing I can think of is British Aerospace.

"It has installations around the North West so that could have been a strategic target."

By the early 1980s, Cold War paranoia was common in Britain, typified by the Government's Protect and Survive public information films and booklet about surviving nuclear war.

But Mr Caunce said the prospect of invasion was "always a fantasy" for Moscow.

He said: "If you are in military planning it is your job to plan and have every scenario covered because if it happens quickly you can pull it out of the filing cabinet.

"But it was essentially blue sky activity."

A Landmark spokesman said: "For more than 50 years, before, during and after the Cold War, the Soviet military undertook the most comprehensive global survey ever attempted and created detailed, accurate maps of practically every country in the world, including the UK."

The maps were scanned and overlaid with current mapping.