Category: Industrial Landscape
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#490 – Teesside Industrial Tourism 1 – Skinningrove
The Cleveland area in the northeast of England was once home to many iron and steelworks. The area was rich in iron ore and its many mines fed the furnaces of the area. Skinningrove had a large ironstone mine and an ironworks was built on the cliffs above the village in 1873/1874 A jetty was…
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#488 – Manchester Mayfield Station 3
And so to the last few from Mayfield. Running the full length of the station and its platforms is a vast undercroft. Many old Victorian stations have these vast underground areas, some of which are accessible and in use some aren’t. For example, the area under Manchester Central – the former Manchester Central station –…
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#487 – Manchester Mayfield Station 2
After closure, the site remained in Railway ownership and has been used as a location for numerous TV series. In 2005 it was hit by a fire, and in 2013 the majority of the huge roof structure was removed due to it being unsafe. A small section of framework was kept in place, probably to…
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#486 – Manchester Mayfield Station 1
Manchester Mayfield Railway Station (NOT ‘train station’ please, we’re not in America), is the largest derelict space in Manchester, a remarkable feat given that it’s been abandoned for over 30 years. It’s even more remarkable when you consider the extraordinary amount of development that has happened in Manchester since the infamous bomb in 1996. Mind…
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#485 – Rockets, Missiles and a corner of Cumbria
It was something of a surprise to me to learn that in the 1960’s, Britain had an advanced rocket program that was looking to launch rockets into space. Though my interest in aviation, I knew of the Blue Streak ballistic missile program which was cancelled but didn’t make the obvious leap to think of it’s…
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#484 – Beehive Mills, Bolton
OK it’s a visual cliche, but it’s a scene that will soon vanish. Beehive Mills, a grade 2 listed twin mill in Bolton will soon be demolished for more housing, so I thought it prudent to go and have a look while I still could. The first mill was built in 1895 with the second…
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#471 – The View From The North 10 Year Retrospective – Book Now Available
In 2007, I decided to create a website. I can’t remember why, but it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. I’ve never looked back. To celebrate the first ten years, I’ve pulled together a book of some of my favourite images. Truth be told, I’d have liked to include a lot…
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#470 – Best of 2016 part 3
So a (belated) third part to my 2016 retrospective continues with a quick look at Mutual Mills in Heywood – not an explore, more a drive by as I was in the area. I’ve a few more from the Manchester area that I’ve not yet got round to posting up – I’ll put these up some…
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#468 – Best of 2016 part 1
So, it’s a few years since I did this, but as 2016 has been a productive year photographically, I think it’s time for a retrospective. I guess it’s down to the fact that over the past few years I’ve been busy with my career and family has meant that taking photographs has not been a…
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#467 – Return to Grove Rake 2
Something I found on the photographs from last time was that they suffered from the lack of dynamic range of the sensor in my Nikon D70. I did bracket many of the images but not all, and consequently, some of the images were technically lacking, but I like to think I captured the spirit…
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#466 – Return to Grove Rake 1
I rarely return to places I’ve explored, primarily because they tend to be demolished, regenerated or burnt down in the time that follows my visit. I made an exception this week to revisit Grove Rake Mine on the windswept wastes of County Durham, a place I previously explored in November 2008. The place was as…
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#465 – Shadows of the North Second Edition now on sale!!
I am pleased to announce that having sold out the first run of Shadows of The North, I have produced an expanded second edition, with many new photographs from 2016 including Brierfield Mill, Hope Mill, Ancoats and several others. I’ve also had a shuffle round of the existing images. The book is now 94 pages…
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#464 – Shipbreaking in Morecambe
Quite how I came across the fact that Morecambe was once a major shipbreaking port is unclear. I think it was through researching something vaguely related but several steps later I stumbled across it somewhere en route. Either way, there’s not a whole lot of information on the net, but I found out that a book…
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#463 – English Fine Cottons – a tour of Tower Mill
If, on the off-chance you’re a regular reader of this blog, you might recall me mentioning on a number of occasions that the only things made in Manchester these days are cornflakes and Coronation Street. I’m only half joking here – large scale manufacturing has been decimated while new industries such as media have prospered.…
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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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#459 – Bailey Mill Revisited
In the summer of 2007 I was on a bit of an exploration rampage, visiting over a dozen sites in a few months. One of my favourites was Bailey Mill in Delph. I’d been tipped off that the metal thieves had forced their way in and were just loading up their highly chromed Transits with copper…
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#458 – Burnley Gas Holder Demolition
Like a giant toy, the old gas holder at Burnley is being dismantled piece by piece. Unlike the demolition of buildings, gas holders are disassembled piece by piece (a great time lapse can be found here). Although I know that gas holders were slowly disappearing from our landscape (see my earlier post on the Blackburn gas…
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#457 – Scunthorpe steelworks revisited
While the photographs I present on my websites etc are often heavily processed, they are all ‘straight’ pictures. Recently though, I have been experimenting with textures to see if the addition of these to an image can bring something else to it. For this experiment, I selected my images of the steelworks at Scunthorpe, a…
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#456 – Mutual Mills
In 1965, Mutual Mills had more than 1,000 people on the payroll and, as well as its textiles operation, had its own Adelaide Engineering division on site (who are still active on site as a sub-contract machining operation). In the 1970s and early 1980s, Heywood’s textile mills were closing down at a rapid rate, blaming…
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#462 – Book Review – The Rouge by Michael Kenna
I’ve had a long fascination with the steel industry. Where this stems from I don’t know, possibly from my time at technical college learning metallurgy from a former British Steel metallurgist, and getting my head round such terms as Jominy End Quench, and other such stuff. The attraction of the photography of Michael Kenna is…
Mechanical Landscapes 