Mechanical Landscapes

Category: Urban Landscape

  • #455 – Vernon Carus Revisited

    #455 – Vernon Carus Revisited

    I visited Vernon Carus’ old Penwortham Mills site back in 2007, not long after the site had closed and work transferred to a new factory round the corner from my house in Chorley. At the time, there was a full time security guard on site who kindly let me wander round for a couple of…

  • #454 – Lambert Howarth Mill Demolition

    I’d read that this mill was being demolished, but hadn’t been able to get over to see it, until demolition was pretty much complete. This is probably the last bit of the Weavers Triangle to be redeveloped, and had been empty since Lambert Howarth closed in 2005 after the owners Lambert Howarth lost a contract with M&S.…

  • #445 – Samsung Galaxy S7 Shoot – London Road Fire Station, Manchester – 3

    #445 – Samsung Galaxy S7 Shoot – London Road Fire Station, Manchester – 3

    Final selection from London Road. Not much else to say really that I haven’t already said. A word or two about the phone – yes, I was being paid to shoot these photographs, but that aside, I was very impressed. The HDR mode was immensely useful in these high contrast conditions, and the screen was fabulous.…

  • #444 – Samsung Galaxy S7 Shoot – London Road Fire Station, Manchester – 2

    #444 – Samsung Galaxy S7 Shoot – London Road Fire Station, Manchester – 2

    London road fire station is an amazing site, arguably well ahead of its time in that it was a multi purpose building featuring a fire station (plus accommodation), ambulance station, bank and a coroners court in one large triangular site in the heart of the city. It served as a fire station until the 1970’s…

  • #443 – Samsung Galaxy S7 Shoot – London Road Fire Station, Manchester – 1

    #443 – Samsung Galaxy S7 Shoot – London Road Fire Station, Manchester – 1

    Opportunities pass, they don’t pause, someone wise once told me. It was one of those passé sound bites that stuck with me and would spring to mind whenever an opportunity appeared, or more regularly when I failed to take one and regretted it after. So when out of the blue I was contacted by a…

  • #432 – Rossendale Mills – Albert Mill, Haslingden 5

    #432 – Rossendale Mills – Albert Mill, Haslingden 5

    I mentioned in my previous post about the east Lancashire mill towns being located in valleys or on hillsides. In some respects, it’s similar to the coal mines in the Welsh valleys – although in this instance it is geography rather than geology that dictated this. The textile industries initial growth was powered by water…

  • #427 – Rossendale Mills – Albert Mill, Haslingden 1

    Going east from the sun-drenched lowlands of Chorley where I reside, the landscape starts to quickly get hilly, and within the many valleys of the West Pennine Moors are numerous former mill towns. Haslingden is one although there aren’t many mills left here. Albert Mill and its characteristic north light windows are almost a landscape…

  • #416 – Blackburn Gas Holder

    A few years ago I spent some time living in Blackburn, and my house was a mile or so away from this huge gas holder. To be honest I never really noticed it. I mean, I knew it was there, but it was just part of the local landscape. I’ve no particular interest in gas…

  • #398 – Library of Congess Images – Main Street Buffalo

    I’m guessing that this photograph was taken by some intrepid photographer climbing a tall riverside gilding such as a grain elevator as for the most part, downtown Buffalo looks quite a low lying city with few tall buildings. What strikes me about this scene is the clear summer sky, as so many of the photographs…

  • #380 – Library of Congress Images – The Long Stairway, Pittsburgh

    The photographs of Jack Delano have been featured before on this blog, and these were the documentary images of and around the railway. This is a slightly different subject matter and style of photography. There are a few different variations of this scene on the Library of Congress website, but this one just works best…

  • #379 – Locomotive and a watertower at the Erie Railroad yards, Jersey City

    This was a bit of a one off in the New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection on the Library of Congress website. It doesn’t appear to be part of a series and I can find no other railway photographs in the same collection. But it’s a good ‘un nonethless, even though it’s needed…

  • #372 – Library of Congress Images – Virginia coal trains

    Boy this was hard work! The negatives were as rough as the environment they portray and must have been developed in gravy and moonshine. Most of the Library of Congress scans that you may have seen in earlier posts have required a few minutes work in Lightroom to give them some contrast and a bit…

  • #359 – Mechanical Landscapes Gallery Exhibition Now Open!

      After too many late nights and a lot of blood sweat and tears, my first exhibition opened today at my local independent bookshop, the delightful Ebb and Flo in Chorley. It’s only 12 framed A3 photographs, but the exhibition space is somewhat small and probably couldn’t take many more, so I’ve gone for quality…

  • #349 – Bank Bottom Mill

      Bank Bottom Mills in Marsden are a vast complex of mills that continued in production until 2003. On my brief visit in 2007, the mills appeared to be mothballed and still full of machinery, but still partially occupied. I did think they’d since been stripped, but having seen a number of reports on the…

  • #328 – Bridge of Change

    I’ve posted before about the once-vast Leyland Motors works in Leyland. Its buildings sprawled for several miles from Lostock Hall right the way down into Leyland town centre, employing thousands of workers and manufacturing lorries for the home market and for export all over the world. Following privatisation it was bought by DAF who went…

  • #321 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 5

    #321 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 5

    Once I’d got the main photos, I tried a few more experimental ones. I like to try to get different perspectives in an attempt to tell a bigger story, and the flexibility of a 14x zoom enabled me to do this easily. These are variations of one I took at Fernhurst Mill a few years back,…

  • #320 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 4

     The view from the north (end) The once monolithic landmark is reduced to a much more compact form. The demolition has been a methodical dismantling, and a relatively neat affair (or at least as neat as deconstructing thousands of tonnes of brick, concrete and other dusty, dirty materials can ever be), and just one section…

  • #319 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 3

    The days of swinging a big iron ball are long gone, demolition these days is more like deconstruction. A long arm excavator with a powerful claw pulls the building apart, and then places all the material for recycling into big piles or straight into trucks. It does make for slow progress though, especially when there is…

  • #318 – The Last Days of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 2

    I grew up in a town full of red brick mills. They were all very similar to New Mill, being very large 4 or 5 storey mills, sometimes in large complexes of two, three, four or even five mills. As the industry shrunk dramatically from the early 60’s onwards, these giants and their chimnies started…

  • #317 – The Last Days of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 1

    New Mill was a massive local landmark, towering over the main street and neat terraced streets of Bamber Bridge. It could also be seen quite prominently from the M6, and was adjacent to the Blackburn – Preston railway line. You really had to try hard not to see it, as it was the tallest building…

  • #314 – It’s not about the space. Or is it?

    I’ve just listened to a great interview on the Candid Frame podcast with Will Jacks. Over the past few years, he has been photographing the goings on in a Mississipi ‘Juke Joint’ a type of bar peculiar to that area of America. he goes every week,  has befriended the owner and clientele, and has gained their trust and…