Mechanical Landscapes

  • #395 – Upcoming talks in March – Huddersfield and Batley

    A bit of early warning that I will be presenting my Mechanical Landscapes talk on the follwoing dates: Tuesday 10th March – Batley Camera Club Wednesday 18th March – Huddersfield Photo Imaging Club. I have no more talks scheduled currently, but will consider all offers. My preference is within a 6o minute drive from Chorley. This…

  • #394 – Photographs from Helmshore Exhibition!

    Finally – a few snaps from my Shadows of the North exhibition at Helmshore Mills Textile Museum. It’s not the biggest exhibition you’ll see, and on reflection it would have been nice to have had an extra display board to space things out a bit but they only own two. I’m working on bringing it…

  • #393 – Shadows of the North Exhibition at Helmshore Textile Museum opens Monday!

    The pictures have been delivered to the museum and are now on the wall, and everything is ready to go! The exhibition will run over the Lancashire half term period, and opens Monday 16th February. It is located in the room between the two mills (rather than the giant exhibiton space on the top floor…

  • #392 – Library of Congress Images – River Steamers

      Harbor Springs, Mich., Str. North Land at dock Large river steamers were not unique to America, big Paddle Steamers carried day trippers on British rivers too. Steamers such as the PS Waverley were once a common site on the Clyde, Bristol Channel, and around Britain’s coasts. And, like America, by the 1960’s, their days of…

  • #391 – Library of Congress Images – Switching (shunting) locomotive

    http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/npc2008011106/ This image was simply titled Bethlehem Steel in the Library of Congress archive, and had no supporting information other than it was published in the period 1910-1920. Interestingly, the engine has written Washington Terminal on the tender, which is confusing given the title of the picture. Wikipedia tells me that the Washington Terminal company…

  • #390 – Library of Congress Images – Mallett articulated locomotive

    Although articulated locomotives were a British innovation, and Beyer Peacock built over a thousand of them, only a few Beyer Garrets and narrow gauge Fairlie’s ever saw service in Britain. However, articulated locomotives were quite widely used in other areas of the world, especially where huge amounts of power were required without the loading gauge…

  • #389 – Library of Congress Images – Ironton Blast Furnace

    This photo is titled ‘Columbia Steel Company at Ironton, Utah a locomotive outside the blast furnace’. The Utahrails website gives an early history of the steelworks, but doesn’t explain its relatively short life of only 40 years. Despite the lack of established heavy industry in the area, Utah was home to deposits of iron ore,…

  • #388 – Steam Engines at the Bolton Steam Museum

    #388 – Steam Engines at the Bolton Steam Museum

    Bolton Steam Museum is the home of the Northern Mill Engine Society, and as I last visited about 5 years ago, I was overdue a re-visit! The society was formed in the 1960’s when mill engines were being scrapped at an alarming rate, a combination of the sudden decline of the textile industry and electrification…

  • Follow me on Facebook!

    My initial dip of the toe in the social media pool was in 2011 when I set up a Facebook page – and promptly did nothing with it. Four years on, I’ve decided that I need to do something with it, so this is the formal launch it never had four years ago! http://www.facebook.com/theviewfromthenorth My…

  • #387 – Industry by Night

    #387 – Industry by Night

    I thought I’d posted these before, but it appears not. These were taken in 2010 on a cold January evening in Redcar on Teeside. The Tata steelworks was due to shutdown within the next few weeks and it looked like the end of steelmaking in the North East was imminent. The mill was shut down…

  • #386 – Mill Lodge and Chimney

    There’s not many factory chimneys left in Lancashire, and very few of those are actually still used. This one at Pincroft Dyers in Adlington near Chorley is one of the few exceptions, and is one of the few remaining printers and dyers left in the area. Other than the cladding on the buildings, this scene…

  • #385 – theviewfromthenorth.org updates

    I first launched theviewfromthenorth.org in 2007, and while new content is only added infrequently at the moment, I do periodically tidy things up a bit. Part of the problem is its size – there are over 60 galleries and nearly 1000 pictures, all processed with varying degrees of skill and attention to detail over the…

  • #384 – Next exhibition – Shadows of the North at Helmshore Mills Textile Museum UPDATED WITH NEW DATE

    I am pleased to announce that my next exhibition will open on Monday 22nd 16th February 2015 at Helmshore Mills Textile Museum in Helmshore, near Rossendale in Lancashire. Shadows of the North is a complement to my Mechanical Landscapes exhibition and focuses on the textile mills of the north of England. It will be slightly larger…

  • #383 – Fiddlers Ferry Steam on the landscape

    Driving back from Bolton Steam Museum the other day, I took the marginally more scenic route via Horwich. Chorley Old Road climbs quite high and is always a good spot for some pleasant views, but I was quite surprised to see the steam rising from Fiddlers Ferry Power Station near Warrington on the horizon. The…

  • #382 – Library of Congress Images – Paddle Steamer Tashmoo

    If you’re slightly familiar with some of my blog posts from this year, you’ll have seen a number featuring the Lake Lucerne paddle steamers in Switzerland. So it felt like a good idea to look at what the Library of Congress archive held when it came to paddle steamers. Answer – hundreds. This is just one of…

  • #381 – Library of Congress Images – Really Big Machines

    While browsing the Library of Congress Historical American Engineering Record, I came across some photographs of something I had actually seen. A few years ago, I visited the Wyman Gordon Forge in Worcester, Massachusetts in an official capacity to see their (almost) unique 50000 ton press in action. For a piece of metal bashing machinery,…

  • #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…

  • #378 – Library of Congress Images – Ocean Liners

    There’s something rather elegant in the design of the ships from the late Victorian / early Edwardian era. There’s something about the low set superstructures on top of the high hulls that made them look quite racy. This is the RMS Oceanic, the largest ship in the world at the time of it’s launch in 1899,…

  • #377 – Upcoming Talk at Bingley Camera Club 8th December 2014

    The next stop on my series of talks in West Yorkshire is at 7.30 on Monday night (8th December) at Bingley Camera Club, who meet at Church House, Old Main Street, Bingley, BD16 2RH. This will be my Mechanical Landscapes talk, which is loosely based on the writings and photographs from this blog and my…

  • #376 – Mechanical Landscapes Exhibition moves to Bolton

    Through my membership of the Lancashire Monochrome group, I have been invited to display the Mechanical Landscapes exhibition to the clubs permanent gallery space at the Bolton Mercure hotel on the A6 near West Houghton (also known as the Georgian House). This is fundamentally the same exhibition as that at Ebb and Flo in Chorley, except that…