Sand, Mud, Sea And Sky

 

I've no idea who the child is or why the donkey seems to have lost its head, but that doesn't matter. It's just one of the prints from my more than plentiful supply of lost and unknown old photographs. It's summer, it's seaside, it's joyous.

Seaside holidays in my youth were spent at either Bridlington on the East Coast or New Brighton on the West. Bridlington was always my favourite: you could smell the fish and the candy floss and the chips. You could walk by the Sailors' Bethel, where they sang hymns to those in peril on the big dipper.

A photo of my Aunty Miriam and Uncle Frank (how can you go swimming in the sea while smoking a cigarette?) and some unknown child. There's a Georges Seurat feel about the scene, and it perfectly illustrates how random old photographs can become works of art in their own right.

I took this picture of Cleethorpes back in the 1980s. I've always had a bit of a love affair with the North Lincolnshire town; it's something about the way the land, the sea and the sky merge together. In any week celebrating the British seaside, Cleethorpes has to be included.

The Buildings Of Halifax Part 2 (And A Trip To The Seaside)

 

Many of the fine old buildings of Halifax you can look up and discover their history, their architectural merit, and their importance to the cultural landscape. of the town. Others you can just look up at and say: "My goodness, that's a fine old building!"

History is so often written into the very fabric of buildings, but it is also ingrained in the function of the building itself. This glorious building on Southgate, Halifax has, over the years, been home to the offices of a canal company, the William Morris Wallpaper Company and the Hoover Cleaning Company. Now it is half empty and half a charity shop. Discuss.

My little mini-series featuring some of the buildings of Halifax, photographed during my walk last week, ends where it started with the offices of the Halifax Building Society. This isn't the nineteenth-century Victorian building featured on Monday, however, but the modern plate glass and concrete building at the other end of town.

I seem to have ended up with another mini-series this week, and it is all about the seaside. Most northern industrial towns would have a traditional "Wakes Week" about this time of the year, when the mills and factories would close down and the workers would head for the seaside. My Wakes Week starts with a photo I took in Eastbourne forty-odd years ago.

The Buildings Of Halifax Part 1

 

I managed a good walk around Halifax the other day, and I decided to focus on some of the lovely buildings we all walk by each day and never really notice. This week is therefore devoted to "The Buildings Of Halifax," and I start at the corner of Princess Street and Crossley Street, and the building that was the original headquarters of the Halifax Permanent Benefit Building Society.

The second in my Buildings of Halifax series features Hope Hall, which now occupies a plot between Clare Road and Clare Street. This is a view of what now is the rear of the hall, but back in the eighteenth century, when it was built, it was part of an imposing front elevation. It's well worth the short walk from the town centre.

I must have walked past Somerset House on Rawson Street, Halifax hundreds of times in my youth without ever knowing it was there. From the beginning of the twentieth century until the beginning of the twenty-first, this fine example of Georgian architecture (by John Carr of York) was hidden behind a row of shops. These days it is seeing the light of day once again, and Halifax is all the better for it.

In 1898, the renaissance came to Halifax in the form of the new Police Station and Magistrates Court building on Harrison Road and Blackwall. When it ceased duty as an offenders' one-stop shop at the start of the current century, it was in search of a new function. Luckily it has found one, and Halifax is a better place because of it.

Giving, Hunting, Dancing And Messing

 

Like many a northern industrial town, Keighley is dotted with public parks either presented to the towns by local businessmen during the age of Victorian philanthropy or purchased by public subscription by citizens anxious to enhance their surroundings. My picture comes from an early postcard and features Victoria Park and its mansion. Somehow I can't see the Musks and the Bezos's of these days doing the same thing.

Diana The Huntress is about to draw an arrow from her quiver and shoot a passing deer cantering along Park Road at the bottom of People's Park in Halifax. Those familiar with the statue today will note that she's lost a bit of her arm since I took this photograph 60 years ago. Please Note: no deers were injured in the writing of this post.

This is the photograph that my Uncle Frank and Auntie Miriam sent around to all their friends at Christmas 1938. It's a studio shot and I've no evidence that they were committed ballroom dancers. I may be doing them an injustice and it may be that many of the sprung ballroom floors of pre-war Bradford were put to the test by their performances.

A photograph from the 1980s which was a bit of a Dark Age in terms of my own photographic history. Colour film meant loss of control, and that control didn't return until I switched to digital photography at the turn of the century. Now I can scan those colour negatives and mess with them - and shed some light on the Dark Ages.

Shares, Change, Drinks And Noise

 

I've collected most things at some stage in my life: stamps, bus tickets, banknotes, newspapers, books, and, of course, images. At one point, I acquired quite a collection of old share certificates. The beauty of these is not that I might have a small stake in some defunct American power and light company, but the glorious illustrations that feature on the stock certificates.

If you are familiar with Brighouse in West Yorkshire, you might recognise the scene depicted in this photo I took fifty-odd years ago. The flour silos are still there (although they are a climbing activity centre now) and so are some of the buildings at the bottom of Briggate. Many of the other buildings have gone, and few people go shopping in a headscarf with a wicker basket anymore!

I have one of my fathers' old diaries from the 1930s, and it records the weekend cycle journeys he and my mother used to go on from their home in Bradford. Many of these would involve a stop at the popular pub, Dick Hudson's, on the hills above Bingley. I drove past it the other day and decided to call in. What a wonderful place; I can see what attracted my parents all those years ago.

Given the heat and the lack of rain, it's extraordinary that nature can still produce such greens as this. The scene looks idyllic, and in many ways is, especially if, like me, you are profoundly deaf. For the rest, the noise from the M62 - just behind the line of trees on the left - has to be contended with.

Black And Brown And Coastal Barges

 

Black Swan Passage in Halifax, so named because it was a passage down by the side of the old Black Swan Inn on Silver Street (approximately where Yates's Wine Lodge is today). This black and white photograph does it justice. For the sake of balance, however, I need to take a white and black photograph of the White Swan Hotel.

Artificial Intelligence can do wonderful things these days. Give it an old black and white photograph, press a button and suddenly it has all the colours of a rainbow. There again, give it one of your of photos of Halifax back in the 1960s and it suddenly has ... fifty shades of mucky brown.

In the mid 1960s, my brother bought an old Humber Keel barge called "Brookfoot" and converted it into a houseboat and studio. After doing the conversion work in Brighouse Canal Basin he then sailed it to the continent and around the canals and waterways of Europe. This photo is from the first time we saw the barge, before the conversion work started.

You could easily mistake it for a coastal view - coastal hills giving way to a grey, coastal sea. There's even a schooner sailing off to distant lands. The sea, however, is a sea of gorse and heather, the schooner is the stone built Stoodley Pike monument on the hills above Todmorden. It's coastal Calderdale.

Thornton And Snowden; Rooftop And Desktop

 

This picture of Thornton Square in Brighouse is from a vintage postcard published in the early 1920s. It had only been called Thornton Square for a few years when the postcard view was taken. It was named after Robert Thornton (1836-1918), who gifted the town a clock, a fire engine, and a place in the record books for being the oldest Mayor in England at the age of 78.

Wanting a suitable illustration for the 1st of May, I turned to my collection of political vintage postcard and find a fine portrait of Philip Snowden MP. Snowden was as full of contradictions as a chocolate teapot - converted to socialism after researching a speech he was due to make on the evils of socialism, eventually becoming Labour's first Chancellor of the Exchequer and then being expelled from the Labour Party for his support of the National Government in 1931. 

I seem to remember taking this photograph from somewhere up Beacon Hill Road in Halifax in the early 1970s. The rooftops created a kind of geometric pattern of the type you would get in school text books when you were required to calculate the angles. The TV aerials added a Mondrianesque quality. Stone and steel, slate and chimney pots: a Halifax skyline.

I'm a desktop kind of chap. I don't hold with these new-fangled laptops or the tablets you can settle down in an easy chair with. Give me a good, old-fashioned wooden desk any day of the week, the kind you can pile real books on, not to mention a bang-on-the-keys typewriter as well. Here's my desk from 57 years ago: I can remember it as if it was only yesterday.

Towering Love And Lifeboats In A Pond

 

As far as I know, this is a family member; it was part of a collection of family photographs handed down to me by my Auntie Annie. That means she is probably a Burnett - and she has that kind of broad, Yorkshire, slightly eccentric look that is common to our family. The photo carried the caption "To my dear niece with best love," which suggests that it is probably Ruth-Annie Burnett (1874-1931) of Little Horton, Bradford.

A trip into Sheffield last night reminded me how much the city has changed since I lived there 40 years ago. This photo of mine from the early 1980s is an even starker reminder. This was Ponds Forge when it was still forging steel rather than creating swimming and diving champions.

A view of a Halifax hillside sandwiched between two cooling towers. The two towers were affectionately known to the locals as "Salt" and "Pepper," and together they created a kind of structural condiment set in what is now Sainsbury's car park. They were eventually demolished in 1974, although it took two attempts before they were finally flattened.

The three subjects of this 1950s "Found Photo" look like they might have been hired from Central Casting. You half expect Terry Thomas to appear with a tennis racket or Margaret Rutherford to waddle on in a fur stole. I'm not sure where The Lifeboat Inn is (I'm hoping someone might tell me), but it is now my ambition to go there.