Category: Industrial Landscape
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#301 – Closing forever
Multipart, Pilling Lane, Chorley, May 2007 As part of the once-vast British Leyland empire, the huge Pilling Lane site in Chorley was a distribution centre for Multipart, BL’s spares arm. In the early 80’s large amounts of money were spent on the site making it into a state of the art facility according to contemporary…
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#298 – Ainscoughs Flour Mill
Another joint explore with Gibbo and R1. Standing prominent on the rural south Lancashire flatlands, is a tall brick chimney and a Victorian flour mill. Probably the largest and highest structure between Liverpool and Preston, Ainscough’s flour mill was once a major employer in the quiet little town of Burscough. It closed in the late 90’s…
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#296 – Man Made Mountains Project
Man Made Mountains from Fourth Dimension on Vimeo. Not my work, but an excellent video that is definitely worth a look! I struggled to understand what the project was all about at first, but realised that the end product was in effect a temporary exhibition of the photographs taken of the slate industry, in the…
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#295 – Old Urbex Reports – Pyestock Part 2
And so on to the famous air house. This large building contained 8 centrifugal compressor/exhauster sets that blew large volumes of high pressure air to all the test bays across site, and is probably the best known building due to the huge number of photographs on urbex sites of its multi coloured turbines. I had…
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#294 – Old Urbex Reports – Pyestock Part 1
Number 10 Exhauster Cell Number 10 Exhauster Cell control room Hidden deep in woodland between the mainline railway and what is now Farnborough Airport, lies a huge, once top-secret aircraft engine test facility, abandoned and decaying, silent and eerie, no longer reverberating with the screaming wails of gas turbines and jet engines. This area was…
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#293 – Re-visiting photos 2
More reworked photos! These are from Edenwood Mill, which if still standing, must be a pile of soggy wood and rubble as it was in a right state back in 2008. This one hasn’t really benefitted much from the monochrome conversion compared to some, but the lens corrections have slightly improved things. The next…
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#292 – Re-visiting photos 1
I’m in the middle of putting some themed Blurb books together and went for a rummage round the darker recesses of my Lightroom catalogue. Lightroom is a great piece of software and I now tend to do much of my photo editing on it (apart form mono conversions and multi layer work), and it’s a vastly…
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#290 – Book Review – Detroit Disassembled
Andrew Moore’s ‘Detroit Disassembled’ is a book that’s been on my wish list for a couple of years now. I’d discovered it just after it came out, as it was released at a similar time to the eye-wateringly expensive ‘The Ruins Of Detroit’ by Yves Marchand, but at about half the price. It’s certainly got…
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#274 – Le Havre Panoramas
A belated follow up to the Southampton Panoramas from a few weeks back! I must admit to being not entirely happy with the composition of either, the top one has nothing at the right hand side to balance out the building and quay on the left, while the lower one has no space to the…
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#270 – Southampton Panorama
One of the features that I’m really enjoying on the Fuji X10 is the sweep panorama function. You can set this to 120, 180 and 360 degree sweeps, but I do find it a little frustrating to use. As I always do 120 or 180 sweeps, it can be a little hit and miss as to…
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#269 – Mechanical Funscape 2
These images are variations on the same theme as the image in the last post. As before, the black and white treatment has brought out the texture of the slightly corroded, painted surfaces of the steelwork. By removing the distraction of colour, the shapes are now far more prominent as are things like the repeating…
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#268 – Mechanical Funscape 1
Engineers have turned their attention to all manner of things, developing machines to serve us in many ways – for example, to feed us, transport us, clean us, kill us, and in the photograph above, to frighten the living $&%! out of us. Camelot is Chorley’s own theme park, and about ten minutes from my…
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#267 – Brymbo Photographs in Urban Realm Magazine
I correspond every now again with Mark Chalmers who shares an interest in urban exploration, and he recently asked me if he could use some photos from Brymbo Steelworks to illustrate an article he was writing for Urban Realm magazine . The article is a feature on a final year MA architecture project based on…
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#265 – Book Review – The Industrial Landscape – Bernd and Hilla Becher
Zeche Concordia, Oberhausen (1967), Germany I’ve heard a lot about the industrial photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher over the years, but from the work that I’d seen, I just couldn’t get excited about it. OK, I’ll be the first to admit that this field isn’t exciting in the same way that, say, motorsport photography…
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#262 – Prestolite of Leyland
I was quite surprised to stumble across this vast crumbling edifice, less than 10 minutes from my home, as most of the former Leyland Motors plants in Leyland had been cleared. Yet, sat behind rows of houses and a dense row of shrubs was this huge, wartime-era factory, now empty after its last occupants…
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#261 – Cheadle Bleachworks
For reasons that are, at best unclear, and at worse, downright weird, I have this thing about industrial ruins. Not so ruined that you can’t tell what it was, but ruined enough to be beyond repair. Proper mongy old crap – roofs caved in, doors hanging off and such like. They’re usually quick to explore…
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#260 – Staffordshire Collieries Part 2 – Apedale
Now this was more like it. Someone at Chatterley Whitfield had told us that there was another colliery, Apedale, that we could visit in Stoke, but it was at the other end of town. As I didn’t have a satnav, I had to follow Bungle at breakneck speed across town to find the…
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#259 – Staffordshire Collieries Part 1 – Chatterley Whitfield
Another one from the archives here, this was an ‘official’ visit to this crumbling edifice on a so-called open day. Actually, that’s being harsh and doing a disservice to our guides from the Friends of Chatterley Whitfield, who are probably more disappointed about the condition of this place than anyone else, and I’m sure…
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#255 – Great North Steam Fair 2 – Coffee Pots and a Colliery
I think this is a de Winton engine, similar to the ones photographed on the Geotopoi blog The colliery at Beamish is a real one, well sort of, it’s made up of bits of other collieries that have been rebuilt to form one new one. The steam engine works as well, and the entire setup makes a…
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#253 – Return To Dinorwic – Film Shots
I’d promised myself that I’d shoot more film in 2012, so the first proper opportunity I had was Dinorwic. As described in previous posts, I took along a digital compact, and two film cameras. Not ideal, but at least the X10 is small enough to slip into a waist bag and is out of the…
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#252 – Return To Dinorwic – Details
Something I try to do when exploring somewhere is to go close in and pick out the smaller details. Not only does it give some variety to the wider landscapes and architectural shots, it allows for a bit more creativity and to look closer at textures, shapes, etc. If you read the Geotopoi blog, some…
Mechanical Landscapes 