Tag: Steelworks
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#534 – In memoriam, Redcar Steelmaking
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#533 – Drone photography – Redcar
I’ve been to Redcar Steelworks a few times, and although it’s now nearly 4 years since the plant was shut down, the site appears to be largely intact from the outside (although I know some demolition work has taken place inside). Attractive though it would be to hop the fence, I know from experience that…
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#519 – Manchester – English Steel, Armstrong Whitworth and a railway line to nowhere…..
Looking north to Ashton Old Road and the site of the old North Street Works This is Redby Street in Manchester, a short insignificant street in the Openshaw district. It connects Ashton Old Road and Whitworth Street and is surrounded by wasteland. There doesn’t seem to be that much in Openshaw these days, but at…
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#504 – 500 Post Retrospective No.4 – Iron and Steel
Britain once had a huge iron and steel industry, but there’s not much left now. The closure of the Redcar works in 2015 meant that there were only two major steelworks left in the UK, along with a number of rolling mills and electric arc furnaces. There had been much retraction of the industry in…
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#491 – Teesside Industrial Tourism 2 – Redcar
I’d been to Redcar a few years ago when the steelworks was active. My initial visit was a few weeks before the site shut in 2010, and again in 2013 after it had been bought and reopened by a Thai conglomerate. This reopening didn’t last long and the site was shut for good in 2015,…
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#490 – Teesside Industrial Tourism 1 – Skinningrove
The Cleveland area in the northeast of England was once home to many iron and steelworks. The area was rich in iron ore and its many mines fed the furnaces of the area. Skinningrove had a large ironstone mine and an ironworks was built on the cliffs above the village in 1873/1874 A jetty was…
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#457 – Scunthorpe steelworks revisited
While the photographs I present on my websites etc are often heavily processed, they are all ‘straight’ pictures. Recently though, I have been experimenting with textures to see if the addition of these to an image can bring something else to it. For this experiment, I selected my images of the steelworks at Scunthorpe, a…
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#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…
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#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,…
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#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…
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#305 – Bad News From Brymbo
If you’ve visited my website, you may have already seen this, but I wanted to spread the news through other channels as well. I have had the following sad news from the Brymbo Heritage Group who look after the last surviving buildings of the Brymbo Steelworks site in North Wales. “Due to the snow that…
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#267 – Brymbo Photographs in Urban Realm Magazine
I correspond every now again with Mark Chalmers who shares an interest in urban exploration, and he recently asked me if he could use some photos from Brymbo Steelworks to illustrate an article he was writing for Urban Realm magazine . The article is a feature on a final year MA architecture project based on…
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#121 – Hot Work
It’s easy to see industrial sites through rose tinted glasses when walking round old, derelict sites or museums, but I’ve spent my career in factories and I know that even today, industry can be hot, hard, sometimes dangerous work. This old foundry is a great example of that – podging rods such as this were used to tap the hot…
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#120 – Cupola Flowers!
Like all abandoned sites, nature has taken up where it left off before the site was developed.
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#115 – Pattern
Pattern found in the foundry. Note sure why, but casting patterns are often painted red (although you can’t see that in this photo). There were quite a few patterns left around the place, quite surprised they’d not gone on a bonfire when the place shut.
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#113 – 13
Huge bowl mounted on a railway wagon for transporting iron round the works. Sometimes photos work just as well in colour as they do in black and white, this is an example of that, as the rich brown texture of the image is such a dominant part of the composition. By converting to black and white,…
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#112 – Terex
This giant dumptruck had its engine removed before being dragged by a bulldozer up the hill to its current resting place. I can only imagine the strength of the guy who apparently sat in the cab and steered it while it was under tow as without an engine there’s be no power steering!
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#103 – Coatham Sand Dunes 2
I enjoy looking at traditional landscape photographs, I just don’t take many myself. And like anything else, the more you do it the better you become, and vice versa. To that end, when I was on the sand dunes near Redcar Steelworks, I thought there was a definite photo opportunity, but I just couldn’t see it. It…
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#101 – Coatham Sands 1
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#100 – Lead in lines
Railway lines are a great way to lead into a photo, although, you do normally need permission to be on them! This was taken at a charter on the Ribble Steam Railway in Preston, and I got down low, to take the shot. With an increasing number of DSLR’s having live view on them, using…
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#59 – Hand held vs tripod
I’ve always regarded tripods as a necessary evil. I hate their weight and the fact they’re so big, unwieldly and time consuming to set up and such like. It’s for these reasons that some people like using tripods, as it forces them to slow down and indulge in a more contemplative type of photography. Each…
Mechanical Landscapes 