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…
Category: Urban Landscape
#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…
#313 – The Duke of Lancaster’s New Clothes
Seeing the Duke of Lancaster from the road for the first time is a bit of a surreal experience. The North Wales coast road is a fairly uninteresting drive as coast roads go, you can rarely if ever see the sea, and the road is a frustrating affair of dual carriageways, single carriage ways, roundabouts,…
#310 – Mechanical Engineering 1
I trained as a mechanical engineer, and I still love the fact that you can see what’s happening with mechanical devices. Of course some pieces of mechanical machinery are incredibly complicated, but motions, cams and flywheels are infinitely more interesting, visually at least, than the PLC’s used on modern machinery. I had to laugh when a metal spinner, a dark…
#309 – Brook Dyeing
This place is long gone now, but was fairly typical of a semi-rural bleachworks that were common across Lancashire and Yorkshire until recently. Located next to a stream in Meltham, Royd Edge Mills was last home to Brook Dyeing who shut some time before 2007 when I went. It was pretty unremarkable apart from the…
#308 – Chatterley Whitfield
This is a photograph that I missed from my post a while back on Chatterley Whitfield Colliery. The image here shows just how much infrastructure is left at the colliery, and the monumental job of upkeep that, well, hasn’t been taking place. When something like this is busy producing coal and making money, then…
#304 – Gate
Oakenclough Paper mill was a large rural mill in he middle of nowhere that closed quite suddenly in the 1960’s. It is in a strangely isolated spot onthe edge of the moorland above Lancaster, and is still occupied by a number of busineses so there was no exploring to be done unfortunately. I was impressed…
#303 – Ivy Bank – Shadows of Change
I love these long shadows! Like something out of scooby doo where the haunted house becomes alive and the windows become eyes. Backlighting (centre jour) can do interesting things, and this was taken on an April morning, when the sun was still low in the sky.
#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…
Mechanical Landscapes 