Steps, Snaps, Slips And Selo

 

I'm not entirely sure which stone staircase in Halifax this was; there were - and there still are - dozens of them: over rivers and railway lines, over roads, and over nothing in particular. We just like steps in these parts; they break the monotony of life, they keep us fit, and they create dramatic patterns for itinerant photographers.

I live my life in line with a number of philosophical precepts - one of the most important of which is "never walk past a pub without taking a photo of it as it might not be there the next time you pass!" When I passed the Robin Hood pub in Brighouse back in 2009, I both took the required photo and, to celebrate, popped in for a pint. It was a good job i did - it's a supermarket car park now.

In the best part of the five years I have been sharing my picture-a-day calendar, I have tried to avoid using the same image more than once, but occasionally I have slipped up. I now realise that I used this photo of mine of Halifax in the 1980s back in September 2024. This is a "messed-about" version of it however, so hopefully I will be forgiven.

I went digging in one of the endless boxes of old photographs that are slowly taking over our house and came up with not a photograph, but a colourful envelope used to deliver negatives and prints back in the 1930s. Oh, you digital slaves of Smarty McSmart phones, you don't know what you are missing - non-curling roll films, self-toning paper, and prints that are full of life and sparkle.

A Spanner, A Brook, A Bear And A View From A Railway Carriage

 

I'm getting old. More and more, I seem to be sitting at my desk messing around with old photographs rather than getting out and about taking new ones. The original of this photo was taken in March 2016 from a train leaving Bradford and heading for Halifax, but this version was created while sitting at my desk last night. I've always been attracted to these shapes and colours. But, there again, I'm getting old.

The Hebble Brook has an odd relationship with the town of Halifax. Over history, it has had such a defining impact on the town, carving its valleys and draining its hills, and yet now it slips almost unnoticed towards its rendezvous with the Calder - sometimes above ground, sometimes culvert-deep in the darkness. I demand a "We Love The Hebble Day" with lantern-boats and coloured streamers.

A very good old friend came to visit yesterday and we went for lunch to a very good old inn. I've been visiting the Old White Beare in Norwood Green for more than half a century, but that's only a moment in the life of this 500-year-old village pub. Some of the timbers within the pub are even older, having been part of an Elizabethan galleon that took on the Spanish Armada. Seated within such history, we felt quite young.

I've given this photo the title "Albert and the Giant Spanner". As far as I can be certain, that is my father, Albert, on the left, which would mean that the photograph was taken about 1930 when he was a young apprentice in Bradford. I'm not sure what the giant spanner was used for, but it's a great photograph.

My Daily Calendar : 9th - 12th March 2025 : Market, Mills, Love And Rain

 

This picture is taken from an old picture postcard and shows Doncaster Market Place in the early years of the twentieth century. A long time ago. I worked in Doncaster during the 1980s and I became very familiar with the Market Place and its many pubs, bars and restaurants. A different time, a different life. A long time ago.

The mills, the houses, and even the blocks of flats seem to conform to the natural contours in this photograph of mine of Halifax forty-odd years ago. Power, religion and industry, however, strike a very different note. Each reaches for the sky in search of its own deity.

Another of my "Found Photos", and the only clue is a written greeting on the back of the photograph which says, "With love from Hilda and Leo". You don't need any more information than that; your imagination can write the entire novel. It's a story two people caught in the shifting sands of history.

Grey rain on grey roof slates and smoke dawdling out of endless chimneys: two of the memories of my youth that are encapsulated in this photograph of mine of Brighouse back in the 1960s. Close your eyes and you can smell the smoke; put out your hand and you can feel the rain.

My Daily Calendar : 5th - 8th March 2025 : Gog, Odd, Faces And Places

 

Gog Hill used to be an important thoroughfare in Elland, cobble-climbing from Elland Bridge up the steep hillside to the top of the town. It was lined by houses that clung to the hillside with stoney determination. For many years it has been abandoned by everything but empty lager cans and cheap thrills. The signs live on - testament to a different age.

Sometimes there is no point to be made, no memories to be revived, and no surprises to be released. Sometimes there is just a nice view and the chance to step back and appreciate it. This is just down the road from where I live. This is grand.

This is not one of my photos: I suspect it was taken by my wife's uncle. It is a view over Elland from Dewsbury Road as it makes its way up Upper Edge. It must date from the 1960s or early 70s, the period before the construction of Elland by-pass which, today, cuts across this scene. There is something odd about the fields and roads in the background, they don't seem to fit in with what I know of the area.

This is another from my "Faces Of Halifax" series - Victorian and Edwardian portraits created by Halifax photographic studios. This couple visited the studio of E Greaves on Silver Street, Halifax towards the end of the nineteenth century to have their likeness captured, and what a stunning likeness it is. This is the Victorian equivalent of a selfie.

My Daily Calendar : 1st - 4th March 2025 : Delivering Beauty And The Mystery Of Parliament

The start of a new month and the start of a new season (meteorologically speaking). Here is a new interpretation of a photograph I originally took some 16 years ago of Shepherds Thorn Lane where I have walked a succession of dogs over the last twenty-five years. New month, new interpretation - same old beauty.

This photo comes from one of the piles of photographs of unknown origin which are gradually taking over my room: my Found Photographs. It shows a man with a horse and cart delivering what I assume is milk. I have no idea where or when it was taken, but that doesn't matter; it is life as it was; it is undiluted history in the raw.

One is tempted to go on about the fall of Parliament, but this is merely the fall of Parliament Street, which was between Gibbet Street and Pellon Lane in Halifax. I must have taken this photograph in the late 1960s or early 70s after the houses had been cleared and before they vanished forever, to be replaced by a retail park. Result: Bargain Homes 0 Home Bargains 1

I have the negatives to some 13,000 pictures I took before my switch to digital images 25 years ago. As I slowly work my way through these - scanning the negatives and turning them into digital images - I can recognise most of the locations. This one, however, is a bit of a mystery. A Google image search suggests it might be St George's Church, Brook Hill, Sheffield, which is a possibility given the likely date.

Halifax Faces

Towards the end of the 19th century, most towns would have at least one professional photographer's studio. It was a time when ordinary people began to have their photos taken, and such photographs - in the form of small "carte de visites" or slightly larger "cabinet cards" - became family treasures. The studios were keen to have their names and locations prominently displayed on these photographic cards, and thus we are able to look back, with a fair degree of certainty, at Halifax - or Bradford or Barnsley or Birmingham or wherever - faces of the past.

Antiquity And Modernity

I seem to remember - although it was almost sixty years ago - I was trying to capture the contrast between the antiquity of the statues in People's Park, Halifax, and the modernity of what was then Percival Whitley College in the background. Now the bits of that building that remain within the shell of the expanded Calderdale College, are themselves antiquities - so what does that say about the photographer?

Torre Del Grimsby

Many famous public buildings in both Europe and America have been copies of the wonderful 14th century Torre del Mangia in Sienna, Italy, but one of the most surprising perhaps, is the Grimsby Dock Tower. The 19th century tower was built to accommodate the 30,000 gallons of water required to power the hydraulic machinery in the docks. The equipment has long gone, but the tower remains as a monument to style and beauty.

Soul, Grace And Majesty

Stand on any hillside surrounding Halifax, and you should be able to make out the town's three great spires: Square Church, the Town Hall, and All Soul's Church. Perhaps the most majestic of the three is Sir George Gilbert Scott's graceful All Soul's which stands on Haley Hill just north of the town centre. Scott designed many of the iconic buildings of the Victorian age, but still maintained that All Soul's was possibly his best church.

Capturing Etruria

Old strips of negatives can be wonderfully evocative because they provide context as well as individual images. This strip of 35mm monochrome images of mine dates back to the early 1970s when I was at university in Keele and would frequently escape the rigors of macroeconomic theory by wandering the byways of the neighbouring five towns that made up Stoke-on-Trent. On the day that I took these photographs I had obviously decided to explore the Trent and Mersey Canal as it passed through the wonderfully named Etruria. 

The area was named by Josiah Wedgewood when he built his new pottery works here in 1769 (it was named after the region of Etruria in Italy in an early example of somewhat fanciful marketing). By the early 1970s, the pottery works had been moved, and the old canal was caught in the doldrums between commercial and leisure traffic. It was a sight made for monochrome, and I was lucky to have the opportunity to capture it.

 

The First Tram In Space

This is a view of a road I knew so well. I used to walk down from school and then take a short cut from Clover Hill Road to Well Head and then the Bus Station for the bus home. There won't have been tram lines there in my school days, but somehow the memories all get jumbled up. My school days seem so long ago, and yet I can remember seeing a newspaper billboard outside the newsagents shop here (where the Swiss Cafe was, I think), announcing the first man in space. Or maybe, the first tram in space.

The reverse of the card is, as always, interesting in its own right. Written in December 1909, it is a thank you note for presents which will have been sent for Christmas. Addressed to "Captain Pacey", it starts, "Dear Sister"; so I strongly suspect we are dealing with a member of the Salvation Army. There was a Salvation Army Maternity Hospital in Hackney around the time of this postcard, so perhaps that is a clue. But there again, Captain Pacey may have been the pilot of the intergalactic spaceship that regularly left from the Swiss Cottage Cafe in Halifax for the dark side of the moon.