Musical Conflagration

It must have been the same day as the "Fire In Halifax" photos I featured earlier this week as this image is on the same strip of negatives. This, however, is a musical conflagration courtesy of a brass band in People's Park, Halifax. By the look of things, the band outnumbered the audience.

Brutalist Geometry

 

I think I took this photograph in Kelvin Flats in Sheffield, but it was a very long time ago, and I never kept proper notes. So here I sit, 45 years later, trying to retrace my footsteps, which is a bit like trying to solve a problem in brutalist geometry.

Having Fun At Hall End

 

Grey And Great

 

Shibden Soul

 

The Maid, Unknown

 

Trucks And Mills

 

Bridges, Mills And Dreams

 

Background Colour

 

Walking Down Shaw Lane

 

Bowling And Bookends

 

Sensuous Concrete

 

Gipping Up The Hill

 

Feeling The Change

 

Dipping In Huddersmolinos

 

History Out Of Focus

 

Sutters, Brass And Bibles

 

Drilling Mist

 

Half-Formed Memories And Photographs

 

Found In A Selfie

 

National Indecision

 

Questions - Flower Boxes

 

Transitions

 

An Inconsequential Beard

 

More Views - Friday The 13th

 

The Music Lovers' Ciggy

 

Solid Feelings

 

Paper Portals

 

The Way We Were - Aunty Annie

 

A Good Night Divided

 

Silo Tagging

 

This is unmistakably Brighouse: the giant Sugden Flour silos are as an effective geotag as any map reference. These two concrete monoliths appear almost timeless, but when I took this photo in 1970, one was just seven years old and the other only a few years older. Many of those buildings and chimneys have now gone, of course, but the silos - repurposed as a massive climbing frame - remain.

Cyborgraphy

 

Today’s scene started life as an overcrowded and somewhat over-coloured back street off Thornton Road in Bradford. Post-messing, I managed to get rid of the cars and tone it down a bit. Artificial intelligence is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

17 August 2024 : Snap

 

Those ever-present companies of seaside photographers - going by names such as Seaside Snaps and the like - deserve recognition for their role in documenting twentieth-century life. My two examples document life in Bridlington in 1950: that’s my father and uncle on the left and that’s me on the right!

16 August 2024 : North Bridge Messing

This is the last of the "taken whilst waiting for my wife who was at the dentist" sequence which is probably a good thing as I was getting a bit silly by this point. The photo was taken from North Bridge, Halifax looking towards Dean Clough. The messing about was done on the seat opposite the dentists whilst waiting for my wife to come out.

15 August 2024 : Beacons

 

They used to hang bodies up there, or light beacons to warn of invading Spanish armadas or French onion sellers. They had fancy beacons to shine down on the folk of Halifax below. What they should have had, however, was a good old cast iron gas light, that would have been a beacon befitting Halifax and its eponymous hill.

14 August 2024 : Green

100 years ago you would have had difficulty seeing the hills that surround Halifax because of the smoke and the smog. 50 years ago you would have seen them but they would have been bare and battle-scarred, testament to what industry can do to land. Now they are green with stone-coloured highlights. You can say what you want, but that's progress.

13 August 2024 : Patterns

 

The second of the series of photos taken while waiting for my wife to emerge from the dentist's. These are the steps leading up to Broad Street Plaza in Halifax - a delightfully curve-less concrete and steel prospect that faces off against the classical elegance of Halifax's Victorian Town Hall on the other side of the street.

Bus Station Dynasties

 

History is sometimes measured in dynasties - the Tudors or Stuarts, the Tangs or the Yans - but for most folk a more prosaic way of marking the passage of time is called for. Having grown up in Halifax and having lived in these parts for large periods of my life, for me it’s bus stations. My youth was framed by the concrete aisles of Crossfields Bus Station: it’s there I dawdled with school bag over my shoulder, it was there I ran to catch the last bus in my late teenage years. Then there was the first version of Wade Street which somehow never felt complete, always seemed like an excuse for a bus station rather than the real thing. Today marks the official opening of the new Wade Street bus station - our solar panelled, cycle-parked, bee-friendly bus station. If you look at it from the right angle, Beacon Hill becomes its roof and that’s what a Halifax Bus Station should be like. So welcome to this new dynasty, may its buses run safely for many a year to come.

Not Seeing The Moores For The Trees

This family photograph from the 1930s perfectly captures a marriage of style and elegance. It also captures a marriage between two people, but I am a little uncertain as to who they are. The one person I can identify is the man seated second from the left, the man with a hairstyle of sculptured grandeur, and he is my Uncle Harry (Harry Moore 1903-1982). He did have a brother, Eddy, who married Minnie Noble in Bradford in August 1933, so there is a reasonable chance that is who the bride and groom are. In the hope of finding more information about this relatively remote branch of the family tree I turned to an on-line genealogy site. I quickly found the elusive Eddy Moore and his bride and for further information I was directed to a public family tree of the Moore family. To my surprise this identified generations of potential relatives I never knew I had: the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of my Uncle Harry and his wife, Annie.

This, however, was where the potential problems started. Aunty Annie and Uncle Harry never had any children, especially not in London when they were just teenagers and long before they had met. In constructing this elaborate family tree - which contained a host of photographs of real members of my family - a simple mix-up with a fairly common set of names had falsely grafted our two families together. What I should really do is to write to the person concerned and point out the error of their ways. I won't, however. Let them share our branch of the family - there are enough eccentric characters in there to go around. And let Aunty Annie and Uncle Harry have their descendants erect trees in their memory. They deserve it.

Sandstone Palaces

 

Sometimes the lines are better blurred. Usually the signs are better blurred. We can forget the message, be it about fake tans or coffee cups, and concentrate on this stone monument to the gods of commerce, a sandstone palace fit for a Coffee King.