Category: Heritage
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#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…
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#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…
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#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…
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#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…
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#645 South Wales Road Trip Part 13 – Big Pit
Big Pit was my last port of call as it was the most easterly pit and therefore – technically – on the way home. It’s the home of the Welsh Mining Museum so like all museums is free to enter, but they do charge £5 to park so regard that as an entry fee of…
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#644 – South Wales Road Trip Part 12 – Lewis Merthyr
Unlike Cefn Coed, the colliery museum at Lewis Merthyr remains open. Mine was a flying visit and I didn’t have time for the guided tour round the buildings as I wanted to look at a photographic exhibition that was being held there as well so I had to balance the time I had between making…
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#605 – Woodhorn Colliery
One of my current long term projects is photographing the remaining mining headgear / headstocks in the UK, and displaying these in a ‘typlogy’ format à la Bernd and Hilla Becher. I’d only managed to visit two sites this year – the unusual clad structure at Meadowbank Mine in Winsford, and the two at Snibston…
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#593 – Snibston – Part 3
Nothing to see here other than some self indulgent colour photographs of rust! The museum part of the colliery site has unfortunately been demolished, but as well as the headstocks, there are a number of other mining artefacts on display in front of the tandem headstocks.
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#592 – Snibston Mine – Part 2
The reason I visited Snibston was to see if I could make some photographs for my ongoing typology project. As I mentioned in my previous post, I feared that as the site had closed, I would either have to jump a fence or shoot from the road. However, the site reopened in 2020, thus eliminating…
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#591 – Snibston Mine – Part 1
My only previous visit to Snibston was in 2010 (here and here), I can’t recall the occasion but it was a rather nice setup, with the site of the colliery being nicely preserved with a modern museum and short heritage railway line featuring diesel and steam shunters hauling the ubiquitous BR Mk1 coach. It was…
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#572 – Bersham Colliery 2
While I was killing time waiting for a clear or cloudy sky (see post 570), I tried a few different compositions. I quite liked this multi layered composition, which is totally different to the single layer type I’m using for the headgear project. This was taken, processed and uploaded t the blog from my iPhone…
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#570 – Bersham Colliery 1
I’ll post a bit of history in the next post, but in this one I want to talk about the photographic aspects of this photograph. As this was going to be part of my ongoing colliery headgear project, I needed a featureless sky. Didn’t matter whether it was a clear blue sky or an overcast…
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#568 – Barnsley Main Colliery 2
The siting of the headgear atop the shafthead building wasn’t unusual, although the backstays are supported by the winding house meaning that no part touches the ground. However, it’s certainly unique in the context of the other remaining headgear in the UK, and made all the more prominent by the demolition of the previous mining…
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#566 – Astley Green Colliery 2
As the gates were shut and preparations for a post-lockdown reopening were still underway, I had to limit my photography to the view from the gate. This is where the camera on my phone comes in handy, as being able to poke it through the bars on the gate gave me a different perspective to…
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#565 – Astley Green Colliery 1
Astley Green Colliery is only a 30 minute drive down the M61 from me, but I’ve not been since 2012, so I decided that my first post-lockdown jaunt would be for a quick look. As of the time of the visit (June 27th 2020), the place hadn’t yet reopened for visitors, but that was fine…
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#461 – Chatterley Whitfield Revisited 2
Institute shaft looming overhead. The view from the landscapes slagheap. The Chatterley Whitfield company logo, cast in iron. Platt Shaft headgear. The looming bulk of the Hesketh. And another one, a little further away. I wanted to frame it between some of the surface buildings to give it a little more context. Steam boilers. These weren’t…
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#460 – Chatterley Whitfield Revisited 1
I rarely go and revisit places that I’ve photographed, with only a handful of exceptions e.g. Bailey Mill last week. Partly this is due to sating may curiosity first time round, and partly due to my usual modus operandi of being one step ahead of the demolition crews. In Chatterley Whitfield’s case, my curiosity wasn’t…
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#450 – Samsung Galaxy S7 Shoot – Crossness Pumping Station 3
And so down into the basement…. Well actually it’s not really a basement as such. Four triple expansion compound steam engines were installed into a new building adjacent to the original one in 1897 to provide additional pumping capacity, but these were removed not long after in 1913 and replaced with Crossley diesels.The diesel engines…
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#449 – Samsung Galaxy S7 Shoot – Crossness Pumping Station 2
Beam engines – f***ing big beam engines at that. Crossness is home to four huge beam engines – Victoria, Prince Consort, Albert Edward (the Prince of Wales) and Alexandra (the Princess of Wales). Prince Consort has been restored to full working condition and Prince Consort is now being worked on. At the other end of the…
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#448 – Samsung Galaxy S7 Shoot – Crossness Pumping Station 1
Crossness Pumping Station is somewhere I’ve wanted to go for years. The magnificent Kew may have a more central location, glossy website and some giant engines, but Crossness is a marvelous mixture of wrought iron, rust and symmetry that is incomparable. I was really blown away by the place. I trained as an engineer, I’m…
Mechanical Landscapes 