My calendar image today features a view of Throstle Nest Farm in Shepherd's Thorn Lane, Rastrick, which is only a few minutes walk away from where I live. The farm is long gone, all that remains is part of a vaulted cellar, and therefore this chance to see it as it would have been 100 … Continue reading When The Song Thrush Sang
Category: Postcards From Home
Fooling Around In Keighley
My love of old vintage picture postcards goes back to my childhood when I would accompany my mother on occasional visits to her uncle, who lived in Keighley, the town of her birth. Fowler Beanland, who was always known in the family - without any trace of sarcasm - as "Uncle Fooler", lived in what … Continue reading Fooling Around In Keighley
Hearth
The 16th century Clough House stood on Halifax Old Road, just north of Huddersfield. Its grandness can be judged by the fact that under the 1664 Hearth Tax it was taxed on five hearths, which at the time was not just grand it was positively greedy. Sadly it was demolished in 1899 and now lives … Continue reading Hearth
A Brookfoot Triptych
After publishing one of my old vintage postcards of Brookfoot - which is little more than a bend in the river a mile or so west of Brighouse - on a Facebook local history site, I started a trawl through my collection to see if I had any more postcards featuring the same spot. I … Continue reading A Brookfoot Triptych
A Direct Line To Halifax
This is an old picture postcard featuring Crown Street in Halifax at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although it dates from an age of horse carriages and gas lights, it is a scene which will be familiar to all those who know the town. Most of the buildings featured in the view are still … Continue reading A Direct Line To Halifax
A Circuitous Route To Huddersfield
I have just acquired this lovely old vintage postcard of Stump Cross, near Halifax. It is a view I am well familiar with, based on a thousand bus journeys home - although those journeys would have been fifty years after this photograph was taken in the early years of the twentieth century. When I regularly … Continue reading A Circuitous Route To Huddersfield
Park Pride
Old picture postcards provide us with a fine indication of what people saw as important about the area in which they lived or they were visiting. On some occasions they would reflect great industrial or commercial achievement: tall mills, railway viaducts that put mother nature in her place, or busy street scenes full of shops, … Continue reading Park Pride
A Walk Along A Windy Promenade
During the first decade of the twentieth century, when picture postcard collecting became the height of fashion, postcards would often be only loosely based on photographs. The photographic image would be simplified, artificially coloured, pixelated, corrected and prepared for the printing presses; and this would sometimes result in images that were only distant relatives of … Continue reading A Walk Along A Windy Promenade
Birthday Greetings From Shrogg’s Park
What better way to end the year than with this fine old picture postcard of Shrogg's Park in Halifax. I had assumed that the two prominent spires in the background were the Town Hall and Square Church, but now I am not too sure. In order to confirm the identity of the spires, I took … Continue reading Birthday Greetings From Shrogg’s Park
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