Mechanical Landscapes

  • #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…

  • #431 – Rossendale Mills – Albert Mill, Haslingden 4

    #431 – Rossendale Mills – Albert Mill, Haslingden 4

    A slightly different perspective to the first one I posted in this series, but all 4 were taken within 20 feet of each other on the same stretch of pavement, albeit using either a 14mm, 18mm or a 35mm lens on my Fuji XT-10. It perhaps needs a little more ‘breathing space’ on either side…

  • #430 – Rossendale Mills – Albert Mill, Haslingden 3

    Saw tooth north light roofs are ubiquitous on textile mill weaving sheds, and can sometimes be found atop the multi storey spinning mills as well. It’s unusual to be able to look down on one from the ground though, but the local topography was on my side here. I’ve never really had the chance to…

  • #429 – Grafters Exhibition at People’s History Museum

    #429 – Grafters Exhibition at People’s History Museum

    On over the summer at the People’s History Museum in Manchester is a new exhibition, Grafters. The subtitle is ‘Industrial Society in Image and Word’ and it is curated by Ian Beesley with some accompanying poems by Ian MacMillan (who has previously provided poems for some of Beesley’s books). The exhibition is split into 8 distinct…

  • #428 – Rossendale Mills – Albert Mill, Haslingden 2

    Haslingden. Someone once told me that there are only two types of weather in the East Lancashire town of Darwen – rain, or about to rain. In fairness, this is true of most of the East Lancashire mill towns, stuck in their little valleys or clung to hillsides. From a monochrome photographers perspective this is…

  • Talk to Lancaster Photographic Society 3rd February 2016

    My next talk is on Wednesday 3rd February at Lancaster Photographic Society (although it was originally advertised incorrectly on my websites as the 8th February). Doors open at 7ish, meeting starts at 7.30 and I will be talking for 90 minutes or so about my photographs. The venue is Priory Hall, Castle Hill, Lancaster, LA1…

  • #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…

  • #426 – Library of Congress Images – Steel Mill Panoramas

    I’ve never worked in the steel industry but I’ve visited the steelworks at Redcar and Scunthorpe and it’s an industry that, as a photographer, continues to fascinate me. The sights, smells and sheer physical size and complexity of the plants are rivaled only by oil refineries. The American steel industry, like the British one is…

  • #425 – Library of Congress Images – the night photography of Jack Delano

    I’ve featured quite a few of Jack Delano’s Library of Congress photographs on this blog over the last 18 months or so. Maybe it’s because he photographed subjects that I am interested in, but his photographs stand out for some reason. While some of the portraits of the railway workers on the Santa Fe and…

  • #424 – Library of Congress Images – street running trains

    I posted some Library of Congress photos of coal trains running through the streets last year. This is something I noted as being quite unusual in the UK. These are some more examples, and this appears to be a full blown express train. This is idle speculation on my part, but I suspect that due to the way…

  • Shadows of the North Book Now On Sale!

    Shadows of the North Book Now On Sale!

    It’s been a long time in the making, but I am proud to announce that I have finally got round to publishing a book to accompany the Shadows of the North exhibition! OK, so I’ve mistimed this quite spectacularly as the exhibition at Queen Street Mill is about to end*, but if you haven’t seen it there…

  • #423 – The secret railway…………….

    Following the wander round Rhydymwyn, I was asked if I wanted to see some abandoned trains nearby. Now that’s the kind of offer that I can’t refuse, so we drove back towards Mold, parked the cars and made our way across some fields. Hidden away from view in some trees is this small collection of narrow…

  • #422 – Rhydymwyn Valley Works, aka The Mustard Gas Factory, Part 3

    The Atom Bomb Connection Rhydymwyn was used to house gaseous diffusion machines with the objective of separating the uranium isotope U-235 from U-238 as this was thought to be the quickest way of producing enough material for an atom bomb. The site was chosen for a number of reasons – there were empty buildings of the right size, it…

  • #421 – Rhydymwyn Valley Works, aka The Mustard Gas Factory, Part 2

      This pencil graffiti has lasted surprisingly well considering it is supposedly 70 years old……   Being a regular visitor to both derelict and active industrial sites, I’ve walked across all kinds of surfaces, but never a rubberised one. The site roads on the southern section were coated with a rubber like asphalt designed to stop…

  • #420 – Rhydymwyn Valley Works, aka The Mustard Gas Factory, Part 1

    The landscape of Britain continues to be littered with the remains of past conflicts. From the Napoleonic era forts of the channel, through to the likes of Chatham dockyard and old ordnance factories, pill boxes and ammunition dumps – you don’t have to look that hard to find something. I’d previously visited the remains of…

  • #419 – Leigh Spinners

    Sometimes, you just see a photograph materialise in front of your eye – the light meets the composition and you are in just the right place at the right time. You stop and just bring your camera to your eye and thankfully you have just the right lens on your camera (I tend to use…

  • Lifting an Engine

    Originally posted on Planes, Boats, Trains: Title: Albuquerque, New Mexico. Lifting an engine to be carried to another part of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad shops for wheeling Date: March 1943 Photographer: Jack Delano Source: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001022482/PP/

  • Talk at Darwen Camera Club  24th August 2015

    For anyone in East Lancashire who is interested in my work, I will be giving my Mechanical Landscapes talk at Darwen Camera Club on Monday 24th August 2015. The meeting starts at 7.30 and the talk lasts about 90 minutes (ish). The club meet at Hollins Grove Church Hall, Hawkshaw Avenue, Darwen, BB3 1QZ http://www.darwencameraclub.org.uk

  • USS Iowa at Brooklyn Naval Yard

    Originally posted on Planes, Boats, Trains: Title: U.S.S. Iowa in dry dock, Brooklyn Navy Yard Date: 1901? Photographer: Detroit Publishing Company Source: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/det1994013759/PP/

  • #417 – Library of Congress Images – A Beyer Garrett in Iran

    I posted a while back some pictures I took of the former Beyer Peacock works in Manchester, and it coincided with stumbling across this photograph in the Library of Congress of the trains run by the allied forces on the Iranian Railways in WW2. I actually posted some photographs of British built 8F’s on the line…

  • My new blog – Planes and Boats and Trains

    I’ve accumulated an awful lot of photographs now from the Library of Congress, and while I’ve posted quite a lot over the past 18 months or so on here, I felt it time to do something a little different. To that end, and because wordpress blogs are free, I’ve set up another blog to run…