Category: Industrial Landscape
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#168 – Attack Of The Giant Egg Cups – Thorpe Marsh Part 2
A few years back, I spent some time working on secondment in the east of the country, and on my drive home, I’d pass various different sets of cooling towers, some abandoned, some active, and yet they all fascinated me. These huge egg cups can be seen from miles around in the flat countryside that…
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#167 – Attack Of The Giant Egg Cups – Thorpe Marsh Part 1
Thorpe Marsh near Doncaster. Dust blowing everywhere, high winds nearly blowing me out of my size 10 work boots, and a post apolcalyptic landscape. Need to go back for another look.
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#166 – pre-visualising an image
In the words of one of my personal heroes, don’t you just love it when a plan comes together? I’d been planning to go and have a look at the Duke Of Lancaster for ages as I had an image in my mind. And it was exactly like the one at the top of the post that you’ve…
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#165 – Square Format
While I’ve never shot a square format camera, I’ve found myself on a number of occasions recently, cropping to a square format. While of course this is retrospective re-composition, as opposed to deliberate in-camera composition, the square format is an interesting one that for some reason is difficult to use. Maybe it’s to do with…
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#164 – The Last Days Of Fernhurst Mill
I find it sad when I see old mills being demolished. Maybe it’s because of their immense size and seeming permanence, or just their familiarity in the northern landscape, but gradually the number is decreasing. I must admit that the rate of demolition seems to have slowed in the past few years, partially due to…
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#155 – The Duke Of Lancaster 3
OK, final bunch of snaps from the Duke Of Lancaster for the meantime. There is a public footpath that runs along the west side of the dock where the ship is moored. Between the path and the ship is a bramble hedge and a fence with razor wire on top, but I wasn’t interested in getting…
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#154 – The Duke Of Lancaster 2
A few more from Mostyn of the Duke Of Lancaster. The ship has been here since 1979, which means that it’s been at Mostyn longer than it was in revenue earning passenger service. Wikipedia states that the original plans were for her to be used as a static leisure centre and market. Marketed as the…
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#153 – The Duke Of Lancaster 1
I’ve never really got excited about mobile phones, only replacing mine when they were worn out or broken. However, now that they’ve become mobile computers that can also make phone calls, they’ve started to interest me a bit more. not so much the technology itself, but what that technology allows me to do. I’d started…
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#145 – Book Review – Shadows Of Change – Leigh Preston
I’ve been in and out of my local photographic society (or camera club as some call it) for several years. Unsurprisingly, the photos I enter into competitions are unlike anything anyone else puts in, and generally do quite well, although some judges just don’t get them. Fair enough, you either love or hate what I…
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#135 – Mechanical Landscapes Book Now On Sale!
Despite a complete lack of public demand, I have just self published a book on Blurb;) Actually, lets make this clear, this book is for me, but if for some reason other people wish to buy it, then they can do, it’s listed at cost price so I ain’t making any kind of profit, at least initially.…
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#133 – Narrow Gauge in North Lancashire
Unlike my post a few weeks back on the West Lancashire Narrow Gauge, this railway no longer exists. It was only in existence for about ten years during the 1920’s – 1930’s, to assist in the construction of the Stocks Reservoir, deep in the Trough Of Bowland. It linked the Jumbles Quarry with the main construction…
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#129 – An Unusual Visitor – Part 2
Just a few more of the River Carrier before it left Preston. I packed a camera and visited the dock on my way into work in the morning, and as expected, I got a nice reflection due to the stillness of the air and the sun being low. Shame about the dockside being on the bottom…
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#128 – An unusual visitor!
***Another somewhat off-topic blog post!*** Preston Docks shut to commercial shipping in 1981, having only made a profit 17 times in 90 years. One of the biggest problems was dredging – being an inland port, the River Ribble needed constant dredging and in 1975-76, 45% of income was sued to keep the channel clear. With ships getting bigger…
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#126 – Mechanical Monster
Bucyrus-Erie BE1150 Dragline Excavator at Swillington, near Leeds in Yorkshire. It’s preserved as a tribute to the ‘Sunshine Miners’, those miners who worked in the nearby opencast workings. I blogged about it last year, thought I’d mention it again, as it’ll be open again for the annual Heritage Open Days on 11-12th September, and if you’re into big mechanical engineering, you really…
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#125 – Tilted Compositions 2
Site of what was (I think) the Group 2 area of Royal Ordnance Chorley, now Buckshaw Village. It’s all been cleared and graded, this single lump of reinforced concrete is pretty much the only remnant of anything resembling structural engineering. From a photographic perspective, the tilted compositions hasn’t worked here – a super wide angle lens would have been…
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#123 – Loch Of Tranquility?
A group of us had gone to Scotland for a very pleasant week at a ‘castle’ on the bank of Loch Long, and I’d done a bit of research to see if there was anything in the vicinity worth exploring. The only thing easily accessible was the abandoned Admiralty Torpedo Testing Station at the other…
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#121 – Hot Work
It’s easy to see industrial sites through rose tinted glasses when walking round old, derelict sites or museums, but I’ve spent my career in factories and I know that even today, industry can be hot, hard, sometimes dangerous work. This old foundry is a great example of that – podging rods such as this were used to tap the hot…
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#120 – Cupola Flowers!
Like all abandoned sites, nature has taken up where it left off before the site was developed.
Mechanical Landscapes 