Welcome to the Website of Alan Burnett: writer, blogger, collector of old photographs, and devotee of all things pointless and inconsequential.
Stone Heroes
When brothers Robert and William Machell built their new mill in Dewsbury in 1874, they chose to incorporate four finely carved stone portraits into the fabric of the handsome Cloth Hall Mill. Two depicted themselves – upper right and lower left – while the others portrayed the then Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli (upper left), and Richard Cobden, the former radical Liberal MP for the West Riding. I stopped to say hello to all four while walking around Dewsbury last week.
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Rooftops And Chimney Pots
I remember taking this photograph half a century or more ago, at a time when there was an outcry against TV aerials as despoilers of urban landscapes. I was always rather fond…
Reversing Requires Remark Methinks
Is there anything better than an old picture postcard – with a dramatic scene of waves breaking over the Blackpool seashore on one side and a cryptic message on the other The…
Look, Duck And Vanish
At the outbreak of World War II, my father (on the left in the photograph), who was in a reserved occupation, joined the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV). He always claimed that LDV…
Half A World Away
A cobbled street of almost mountainous proportions, gas lamps casting light over a greyscale scene, and washing lines stretching from side to side like cut-price bunting: this was Claremount, Halifax,…
