Mechanical Landscapes

  • #680 – Hatfield Colliery 5

    #680 – Hatfield Colliery 5

    Compare the close in typology shot with the wider view showing the messiness of the site to demonstrate the art of composition and choosing what to include and exclude in the image. Two different photos of the same scene from a (more or less) similar position. Both photos are interesting in their own right, but…

  • #679 – Hatfield Colliery 4

    #679 – Hatfield Colliery 4

    I first posted my photographs of Hatfield Colliery a few years back here, here and here. But I took quite a lot on the day and I sometimes dip back into them to process one that I didn’t bother with first time around. This is one of them and while it’s maybe not of the…

  • #678 – Redcar steelworks at night

    #678 – Redcar steelworks at night

    Recently, I’ve been going through the photographs I’ve taken of the Redcar steelworks on my various visits over a 10 year period before it was demolished, and I found a series of night photographs that I’d forgotten about. I’ve actually posted a couple of them before (a good few years ago), but it’s always good…

  • #677 – Anglesey Mining Headgear 2

    #677 – Anglesey Mining Headgear 2

    This is the typology photograph I ended up with. It’s realistically only viewable side on from this side and although I could have wandered on site to get a slightly better view I’m not sure it would have been vastly superior and I like the inclusion of the greenery at the bottom. It’s a simple…

  • #676 – Anglesey Mining Headgear 1

    #676 – Anglesey Mining Headgear 1

    This place had been on my list of places to photograph for my typology for a while but it’s a long drive and I’d relegated it to do ‘later’. But we booked our 2023 summer holiday in Anglesey so there was no excuse not to pay a visit! I’d visited the island previously in 2010…

  • #675 – Chatterley Whitfield 2

    #675 – Chatterley Whitfield 2

    I took a number of photographs of this view, trying to find the composition that was ‘just right’. And that is both the benefit and curse of digital photography, each exposure costs £0 so you can click away, unlike with film where very exposure costs you anything from several pence to several pounds depending on…

  • #674 – Chatterley Whitfield 1

    #674 – Chatterley Whitfield 1

    The crumbling Chatterley Whitfield Colliery is somewhere I’ve visited a couple of times on the annual Heritage Open Days and it’s a site I enjoy wandering round. They also open on some Saturdays so I decided to coincide a visit with a trip to the Foxfield Colliery. Unfortunately an email was sent out a few…

  • #673 – Foxfield Colliery Revisit 2

    #673 – Foxfield Colliery Revisit 2

    So while my primary reason for visiting was to get photographs for my typology, I did want to see a bit more of the site. Most of the original site is now a more modern industrial estate and yards, but as well as the two headgears and sidings, the railway also own a few smaller…

  • #672 – Foxfield Colliery Revisit 1

    #672 – Foxfield Colliery Revisit 1

    I first went to the Foxfield Railway in December 2011 for a photo charter involving a crane tank engine at the Foxfield Colliery. The colliery was a rare survivor – it had shut in the 1960’s but for reason that are unclear the site wasn’t levelled and the headgears (and some of the surface) buildings…

  • #671 – Astley Green revisited 3

    #671 – Astley Green revisited 3

    A (belated) last photograph from Astley Green, maybe slightly influenced by the street photographer Saul Leiter. OK, very influenced – my influences are many and diverse, although there’s no evidence of Leiter ever taking a photograph of a coal mine! This was very much a chance photograph – I’d finished looking round and had retired…

  • #670 – Astley Green revisited 2

    #670 – Astley Green revisited 2

    June 2024 saw a lot of changeable weather, and the day i visited alternated between sunshine and blue skies and dark clouds and rain. I’d taken a few photos of the headgear with an old railway crane in the foreground, as I liked the way the lattice structure on the boom complimented the lattice structure…

  • #669 – Astley Green revisited 1

    #669 – Astley Green revisited 1

    Astley Green Colliery – a geographical ambiguity. Saying it’s in Wigan will trigger the locals into fits of raging denial. While it doesn’t actually sit in the town of Wigan, it sits within the borough of Wigan, specifically Astley Green which comes under Tyldesley. The site is leased from Wigan Council, and if you’re travelling…

  • #668 – Wood Top Mill, Burnley

    #668 – Wood Top Mill, Burnley

    While Burnley was known as a textiles town, the decline in that industry in the mid 20th century left a great deal of empty mills, and a number of these were taken over by the expanding aerospace industry. The catalyst for this was WW2 and with Burnley’s relatively remote location and skilled workforce, Lucas industries…

  • #667 – Willington Cooling Towers

    #667 – Willington Cooling Towers

    The power station was closed 25 years ago, but like Thorpe Marsh, the cooling towers have been left standing because, well just because. I was only going past here because my sat nav diverted me round a crash on the A50, and I didn’t have time to circumnavigate the fence to find a way in,…

  • #666 – Scottish typology images

    #666 – Scottish typology images

    Two different headgears, five minutes apart. Barony is much easier to photograph, its sheer size make it relatively easy to photograph, although to get far enough away means you have to shoot from the south and wander into some undergrowth. But it stands in splendid isolation apart from various boards explaining the history and what…

  • #665 – Highhouse Colliery

    #665 – Highhouse Colliery

    If you turn right when you leave the Barony A Frame, and drive less than 5 minutes down Barony Road, you will find the Highhouse colliery headgear tucked away in the corner of a small industrial estate in Auchinleck. It’s not in great condition and it’s one of the smaller headgears I’ve seen, probably a…

  • #664 – Barony A-Frame 2

    #664 – Barony A-Frame 2

    The A-frame is apparently 180 feet high, and it’s certainly a big old thing. But with the demolition of the car hall underneath it it looks weirdly top heavy, almost alien like. So I’ve decided to accentuate this by using a 14-30 lens. The view from underneath is unusual to say the least. I’ve taken…

  • #663 – Barony A-Frame 1

    #663 – Barony A-Frame 1

    Barony Colliery, to the west of Auchinleck in Ayrshire was the last of the pits in the west of Scotland to close. It consisted of a number of shafts, although 1 and 2 were closed in the 1960’s, but all that survives is the headgear of No.3 shaft, more commonly known as the Barony A-Frame.…

  • #662 – Taylor’s Bell Foundry 2

    #662 – Taylor’s Bell Foundry 2

    The initial job for the foundry men was removing the slag from the furnace before they turned up the heat again and returned to their chairs in front of the heater at the other end. Not long after, they returned to the furnace, tuned off the heat and began to pour the molten iron into…

  • #661 – Taylor’s Bell Foundry 1

    #661 – Taylor’s Bell Foundry 1

    John Taylor’s bell foundry is somewhere I’d been aware of for some time, and when I found out that they did tours and allowed visitors to watch the casting, I started to keep an eye out for when I could go along for a look. Two years passed, before I actually booked on as 2024…

  • #660 – Middleport Flour Mill, Stoke

    #660 – Middleport Flour Mill, Stoke

    I took a wander round the Middleport area as I wanted to photograph the bottle kilns at Furlong Mills (not the easiest things to photograph and they’re not very interesting photos), but a tall brick chimney nearby piqued my interest. Turns out it was the Middleport pottery, which I didn’t have the time to go…