It's goodbye to the fens and the farms, the sea and the sand, and a return to more familiar landscape of mills and moors, chimneys and chapels. Here's one I took earlier - about sixty years earlier, in fact. It was taken looking towards Halifax from Haley Hill, from a spot that I suspect no … Continue reading A Passage To Halifax
Tag: Halifax
Sticking With The Coal Wagon
I must have taken two versions of this particular scene back in the 1960s because I have one in colour that features a rather classic 1950s car. I used that as my calendar image on 14 June 2024, so you are stuck with the monochrome version featuring a coal wagon for the 12 May 2025.
Framed In Stone
Halifax Town Hall framed in stone. Both the town hall and the half-demolished building on Winding Road (which was probably the works of Haigh, Allan & Co, Brass Founders and Finishers) must be of a similar vintage, but when I took this photograph in 1969, one was going, and one, thank goodness, was staying.
Coastal Calderdale
You could easily mistake it for a coastal view - coastal hills giving way to a grey, coastal sea. There's even a schooner sailing off to distant lands. The sea, however, is a sea of gorse and heather, the schooner is the stone built Stoodley Pike monument on the hills above Todmorden. It's coastal Calderdale.
Fifty Shades Of Mucky Brown
Artificial Intelligence can do wonderful things these days. Give it an old black and white photograph, press a button and suddenly it has all the colours of a rainbow. There again, give it one of your of photos of Halifax back in the 1960s and it suddenly has ... fifty shades of mucky brown.
Black And White Balance
Black Swan Passage in Halifax, so named because it was a passage down by the side of the old Black Swan Inn on Silver Street (approximately where Yates's Wine Lodge is today). This black and white photograph does it justice. For the sake of balance, however, I need to take a white and black photograph … Continue reading Black And White Balance
A Halifax Skyline
I seem to remember taking this photograph from somewhere up Beacon Hill Road in Halifax in the early 1970s. The rooftops created a kind of geometric pattern of the type you would get in school text books when you were required to calculate the angles. The TV aerials added a Mondrianesque quality. Stone and steel, … Continue reading A Halifax Skyline
Structural Condiments
A view of a Halifax hillside sandwiched between two cooling towers. The two towers were affectionately known to the locals as "Salt" and "Pepper," and together they created a kind of structural condiment set in what is now Sainsbury's car park. They were eventually demolished in 1974, although it took two attempts before they were … Continue reading Structural Condiments
Bad Old Lane
It's not easy to take bad photographs these days. The dullest of smartphones can deliver a perfectly exposed image with the click of a pretend shutter in the most challenging conditions. You do, however, miss out on those odd occasions when a bad photograph turns out good - this grainy, dull photo of Old Lane … Continue reading Bad Old Lane
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