Welcome to the Website of Alan Burnett: writer, blogger, collector of old photographs, and devotee of all things pointless and inconsequential.
Windows 80
I call this photograph Windows 80, not as a tribute to some upcoming Microsoft operating system, but because it was taken in 1980 looking out of the window of my parents-in-law’s house in Bedford Street, Elland. Images can truly transport us, and the sight of those curtains, the bowl of fruit, and those plastic flowers sends me cascading back through the decades with an potency no computer operating system can ever match.
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The Sea, The Sea
My mother loved the sea. Go within salt-spray distance of the coast, and you would find her paddling along the shoreline, watching the waves come in. My brother sent me this photograph…
The Cauldron
On countless occasions in my youth, I would walk through Northowram village, along Howes Lane to the point where the earth ends and Shibden Valley begins. I would focus my camera on…
Hebridean Dreaming
We were whisky distillery-hopping on Islay (can they be a finer way to spend time?) As someone once said (or sung), we stopped into a church, we passed along the way. I…
… And They Sailed Away
My trawl through my collection of old photographs to find a suitable illustration for St. Valentine’s Day came up with this one. As so often is the case, I have…
A Beacon Hill Timeline
I sometimes think that one of my most useful contributions to history would be to produce a Beacon Hill timeline. So many old photographs of Halifax feature Beacon Hill as…
Photographic History
This photograph came to me from my Great Uncle, Fowler Beanland, who, during the First World War, was a foreman at a munitions factory in Keighley. The photo shows fifteen…
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