I took a photograph from the Metrolink station on my previous visit (below), but it wasn’t that good so I didn’t do anything with it . In fairness, it was a truly awful day with heavy rain and high winds making photography difficult as I was constantly wiping rain drops off the front element of the lens, a fools errand in those conditions, as you’ll notice that there is a rain drop on the chimney.

Fast forward 13 months and the scene has changed enormously. The removal of the walls of the mill has opened up the landscape and this vantage point now affords views going back to the derelict St. John’s Church in the distance. But it is the recession of the vertical structures in the scene that make the composition an interesting one, with the pile of rubble in the foreground providing a strong base for the scene.

Beyond that though, the scene tells a different story to the one I took last time. The church was built in 1844, the mill was built in 1907, and the Rountree House flats in 1968, so about 62 year intervals between their respective constructions. The church was closed in 1982 due to a shrinking congregation, possibly due to the influx of south Asian migrants in the area to work in the local mills who were more likely to be of the Muslim or Hindu faith than Christian. And in the background to the mill is the new housing that is being built to replace the rows of Victorian terraced housing that has been cleared away over the past fifteen years.