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,…
Tag: Textile Mill
#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
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…