Welcome to the Website of Alan Burnett: writer, blogger, collector of old photographs, and devotee of all things pointless and inconsequential.
Safely To The Other Side
Another way to cross the River Mersey is the method I’ll be using later today: travelling through the Mersey Tunnel. The Queensway Tunnel – the one I’ll be using – was constructed in 1934, the year before this fine old picture postcard was sent. Built at a cost of £8 million, it was the world’s longest road tunnel for the first fourteen years of its existence. A masterpiece of twentieth-century civil engineering, it will hopefully get me safely to the other side.
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Ferry Across The Mersey
Later this weekend, I will be crossing the River Mersey. To celebrate, here is a photograph taken during a trip across the river more than seventy years ago. Later this year, I…
The Uses Of Zion
Coming across this old photograph – which I must have taken forty or more years ago – I was initially unsure of the exact location, as most northern towns and cities had…
Municipal Pride
The third element of my Dewsbury triptych is the rather beautiful Dewsbury Town Hall, built in 1886 by local architects Henry Hottom and George A. Fox. It dates from a time when…
Dewsbury Top And Bottom
The second of my Dewsbury triptych celebrates that moment – which all photographers know well – when you suddenly catch sight of an alignment of objects or an idiosyncratic collection…
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…
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…
