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…
Category: Black and White
#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
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
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
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
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…
#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…
#659 – Price and Kensington Bottle kiln
Stoke is somewhere I only ever drive through on the A50 while trying to get somewhere else. Other than a couple of visits to Chatterley Whitfield Colliery on the outskirts, I’ve never had cause to stop and explore. But as I was heading down to the East Midlands and had some time to spare, I…
#658 – Ratcliffe Power Station 2
It’s possible to see the cooling towers from the south and the west, so I had a quick look round to get a few different perspectives. There are eight in total, neatly arranged in two rows of four. I found that the most interesting composition was the one above, with the sun over my shoulder…
#657 – Ratcliffe Power Station 1
Ratcliffe Power Station was one of many built in Britain in the 1960s and 1970’s but it’s claim to fame was that when it closed at the end of September 2024 it was the last coal burning station in the country. Positioned to take advantage of the abundance of coal that was mined by the…
Mechanical Landscapes 