Welcome to the Website of Alan Burnett: writer, blogger, collector of old photographs, and devotee of all things pointless and inconsequential.
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 hope to make a slightly longer water crossing to be reunited with my brother. For now, we will have to be satisfied with this memory from all those years ago, captured during our “Ferry Across the Mersey.”
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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 of shapes,…
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…
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…
