Mechanical Landscapes

Tag: Textile Mill

  • #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…

  • #415 – Leigh Spinners Mill Engine – The Giant Awakes………..

    After years of service, the giant was no longer needed. Obsolete and old, it was given a spot of oil and the blankets were put on. The giant went to sleep, resting, and maybe mourning the loss of it’s twin next door, cut up by the scrapman after a boiler explosion ripped apart it’s lungs.…

  • #358 – Old Lane Mill

    Sometimes images naturally lend themselves to high contrast, others don’t. In this I’ve shown what happens when you go too far. The starting monochrome conversion was inevitably quite flat, muddy looking even although given it was a grey overcast day on a muddy wasteland that’s to be expected. But overall, the scene just didn’t suit…

  • #349 – Bank Bottom Mill

      Bank Bottom Mills in Marsden are a vast complex of mills that continued in production until 2003. On my brief visit in 2007, the mills appeared to be mothballed and still full of machinery, but still partially occupied. I did think they’d since been stripped, but having seen a number of reports on the…

  • #344 – Reworked Images 10 – The Gate

    Oakwood mill is a complete ruin, quite why it’s been deemed worth keeping up rather than being demolished is beyond me, when some magnificent structures elsewhere have been flattened. I didn’t even bother looking for a way in, I took a few externals and moved on to look at other stuff in the area. I…

  • #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…

  • #312 – Mill Yard

    I revisited these pictures of Bailey Mill recently and re-processed them more to my liking. The first one is taken from the middle window of the bridge that you can see in the second picture. The bridge was well and truly sealed up at one end, so I couldn’t get into the other building, in…

  • #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

    #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…

  • #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.

  • #302 – Loom Of Doom

    In the corner of the top floor of Bailey Mill, sat this, one of the last looms produced by the Dobcross loom company in nearby Diggle. The loom industry used to be huge, with the likes of British Northrop in Blackburn employing 3000 people at their massive site in Blackburn. But with the rapid decline of…

  • #300 – Old Lane Mill Again

    I just can’t get the sky right on this. Well, when I say ‘right’ I mean, that I’m struggling to get a look that appears in fitting with the rest of the image. It was dull overcast day, and although I’ve been able to recover some sky detail from the raw file, I can’t seem…

  • #293 – Re-visiting photos 2

    #293 – Re-visiting photos 2

    More reworked photos! These are from Edenwood Mill, which if still standing, must be a pile of soggy wood and rubble as it was in a right state back in 2008. This one hasn’t really benefitted much from the monochrome conversion compared to some, but the lens corrections have slightly improved things.   The next…

  • #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…

  • #222 – Derelict Mills – Part 10 – Vernon Carus

    #222 – Derelict Mills – Part 10 – Vernon Carus

    More often than not, the places I go are dead. Not just as a building, but the companies that inhabited it have also died, along with all the traditions, products and culture that was unique to that enterprise. Technology and commerce move on, budgets shrink, new companies with lower costs come into the market, older companies…