Whenever I look at my old photographs of Halifax from the sixties and seventies, I am reminded of just how much it was a period of change for the town. Roads were being built whilst others were being demolished, chimneys were coming down whilst tower blocks were going up. And the trees were coming back: after being ground down by the soot of the industrial revolution for two centuries, they were beginning to repopulate the hills.
This third photograph taken from the top of Beacon Hill seems to sum all that change up. The road up to Southowram seems to snake like a lazy s: the old is being swept away by the new.
One bad bit of the old that was swept away, thankfully, was Mitchell and Broadbent's boneyard, set right in the middle of your photo. On a nice warm summer's day, the whole of Halifax, down in the dip, was pervaded by the sickly stench of rotting offal, emanating from the boneyard's boiling and rendering equipment. Alan must surely remember it well. One of this company's employees(as another string to her bow), in the "Mit" cat food department, was Lily Fogg, one of the town's most famous nocturnal personalities who is celebrated in a ballad that can be heard on Youtube.
ReplyDelete