Mechanical Landscapes

Tag: Demolition

  • #596 – A Return to Hartford Mill 2

    I took a photograph from the Metrolink station on my previous visit (below), but it wasn’t that good so I didn’t do anything with it . In fairness, it was a truly awful day with heavy rain and high winds making photography difficult as I was constantly wiping rain drops off the front element of…

  • #595 – A Return to Hartford Mill 1

    #595 – A Return to Hartford Mill 1

    I thought that Hartford Mill had been erased from the landscape in the weeks after my visit in February 2020, turns out it hadn’t. A contact of mine who lives about 5 minutes away from it had posted a picture similar to the above on Flickr later on in 2020, but I assumed that demolition…

  • #563 – Hartford Mill 4

    Last couple from Hartford Mill now, which I’d forgotten about in the fog of the pandemic. Taken from a couple of different perspectives in between gaps in the torrential rain I experienced on the day, the first one was from between the bars of a big steel gate that although locked, kept swinging wildly in…

  • #562 – Hartford Mill 3

    I rarely talk about cameras on this blog. I find photography more interesting than cameras although I do own a few. I regard them as tools in the toolbox and I choose the most appropriate one for whatever / where ever I’m going. So when I decided to re-visit Hartford Mill a few weeks after…

  • #561 – Hartford Mill 2

    Last week I posted some photographs taken from the ground of Hartford Mill, so let’s take a look at some of the aerial ones. Despite shooting into the light, the little camera on the drone performed remarkably well. It’s a one inch sensor so considerably smaller than my full frame Nikon but it didn’t flare…

  • #544 – Review of the decade – 2013

    2013 was a very demanding year – my grandparents traumatic struggle with dementia and illness which resulted in my grandfather’s death in December, a change of role at work which saw me traveling overseas regularly and moving house (just up the road) – meant photography got shunted further down the list of priorities. I did…

  • #536 – Brent Bravo and the Industrial Landscape of Teesside

    #536 – Brent Bravo and the Industrial Landscape of Teesside

    Last year, I visited Teesside to see the Brent Delta oil rig at Able UK’s yard in Seaton Carew near Hartlepool. I wrote last time about the surreal landscape of the Tees, and how incongruous it is to see an oil rig. Actually, it blends in quite well, but it is still a massive lump…

  • #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…

  • #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.…

  • #433 – The last days of Sunnyside Mills, Bolton

    #433 – The last days of Sunnyside Mills, Bolton

    I happened on this article last week and decided to take some time to get a few photographs of this landmark mill tower before it disappeared. I got there just in time. Demolition contractors were on site and much of the rest of the mill had already gone. It’s a difficult place to photograph as…

  • #323 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 7 – a few more in monochrome

    As I was about to go on holiday, I thought I’d swing by after work to get a few more shots of the mill, in case it had gone by the time I got back (it hadn’t, it was still there). The evening sun was largely in my favour, and with a cloudy sky, there…

  • #322 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 6 – a few in monochrome

    With a spare hour after a week spent on the road, I made the short trip up the A6 to see what was left of the mill. The answer – everything that was there on my previous visit the week before, nothing had changed. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten that in the morning, the sun is behind the…

  • #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…

  • #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…

  • #292 – Re-visiting photos 1

    #292 – Re-visiting photos 1

    I’m in the middle of putting some themed Blurb books together and went for a rummage round the darker recesses of my Lightroom catalogue. Lightroom is a great piece of software and I now tend to do much of my photo editing on it (apart form mono conversions and multi layer work), and it’s a vastly…

  • #244 – Belgrave Mills

    I’ve had an IPad for a while and find it to be a monumental distraction – mine’s stuffed full of music, photos, games, books and various other apps. It’s ease of use and quick start up make our netbook feel like a Commodore 64. One thing I hadn’t really tried out until recently were the photo…