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: Industrial Landscape
#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…
#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
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
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
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…
Mechanical Landscapes 