Welcome to the Website of Alan Burnett: writer, blogger, collector of old photographs, and devotee of all things pointless and inconsequential.
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 a Mount Zion Chapel. I eventually narrowed it down to a building on Westfield Terrace in Sheffield, which has had a colourful history: it has served as a chapel, part of the old Royal Hospital, offices and, more recently, apartments. Fine buildings should have many uses; it is good to…
Keep reading
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 Hall Mill.…
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…
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…
