wolfism
24-03-2009, 11:09 PM
No history this time – it will come later. Visited with Cuban.
The mill was planned in the late 1950’s, and completed at the start of the 1960’s. Once part of a famous textiles group, it closed several years ago and has since been subject to the neds’ sweet caress. The approach to it is typical of industrial wastelands throughout the country – past a rusting branch line railway, a gasometer, some electricity pylons; a coup with shootings of rubbish spilling into a canalised river, nearby a scrap metal yard with its hydraulic grab rending chunks of metal.
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4707.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4703.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4694.jpg
The sky was overcast all morning, the air laden with dampness. On the inside of the security fence – the thick yellow grass in tussocks – the broken crates and pallets, and scrap iron dotted around the perimeter. The mill’s boarded-up doors close off a majestically-scaled weaving shed – the biggest of its era in Europe – with mist hanging in the blue distance at the far end. Our boots crunched over ground-up fluorescent tubes, and large shards of wired glass which had fallen from the rooflights. Multi-coloured plastic bobbins were scattered over the floor, rolling in circles when the breeze caught them, and just beyond lay a series of deep, water-filled dyeing pits which look like a system of docks in miniature. Off to one side are pressed-metal stores strewn with woollen waste, as dirty as the coats of winter sheep.
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4678.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4660.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4629.jpg
Deeper into the mill are stacks of punched cards which once fed automated Jacquard looms (the looms were made in Paisley) – but very little machinery is left in this part. Inside a row of little rooms on the west of the weaving floor are steel chests full of the patterns which the Jacquards wove – printed out in garish colours by an inkjet plotter, looking old-fashioned and out of time. Beyond them lies a taller block held up by circular concrete columns, and clad in honey-coloured bricks – at the top was the beaming department, sitting brightly under ridge and furrow rooflights. Today, its timber parquet lies warped by the dampness, lifting at the corners and joints like an unpeeling stamp. There are inspection rooms to the side, flooded with light. The machine floors lay underneath, sitting above a joinery and engineering shop in the dingy basement, complete with sprinkler tanks emerging from an octopus of pipework.
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4622.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4606.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4586.jpg
Sound carried across the site, and after Cuban and I split up to explore the site, I heard the crunch of footsteps, and voices close by. I lay low in the mill’s showrooms, then heard dogs barking in the distance; the wind changed, and everything fell quiet again. Maybe it was nothing. Linked to the tall block via concrete bridges is a white-rendered tower which contained the mill's laboratories. These lay behind a wall of windows in typical Sixties style: a chequerboard of coloured spandrel panels and plate glass. Dusty chemical bottles and old lab instruments lie alongside sample rooms strewn with wool … skeins and strands and hanks and tufts, every colour you could wish for. A little like the room of wool at the back of Kirkheaton Mills. In this case, the new mill was built as man-made fibres came into use, and a large research effort went into developing lightfast dyes for use with nylon and other synthetics.
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4557.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4545.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4539.jpg
By contrast, the boiler house lies at the other side of the site, completely wrecked, and the stores beyond, stripped of wall and roof cladding, exposing their skeletons to the weather. All the columns and beams are stamped “Lanarkshire Steel Company” – who seem to have cast the structural sections in all my recent explores – like the paper mill, the transformer plant; the glittering prize and the fear factory. LSC is another lost name. You may think that the mill looks downbeat – but I particularly identify with Modernist factories like this. There's a delicacy to their steel-framed windows; the textures of zig-zag rooflights; the spindly metalwork and timber balustrades that were in vogue between the Festival of Britain and the dawn of Brutalism. More than anything, they expressed optimism in an industrial future which we struggle to feel nowadays.
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4527.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4512.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4504.jpg
Finally, as we left the site, we met a group of four schoolgirls heading towards the mill. They stopped whooping and shrieking when they saw the cameras – “Why are ye takin photaes? Are ye fae the Standard?” I explained what we were doing, but they weren’t convinced …
The mill was planned in the late 1950’s, and completed at the start of the 1960’s. Once part of a famous textiles group, it closed several years ago and has since been subject to the neds’ sweet caress. The approach to it is typical of industrial wastelands throughout the country – past a rusting branch line railway, a gasometer, some electricity pylons; a coup with shootings of rubbish spilling into a canalised river, nearby a scrap metal yard with its hydraulic grab rending chunks of metal.
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4707.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4703.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4694.jpg
The sky was overcast all morning, the air laden with dampness. On the inside of the security fence – the thick yellow grass in tussocks – the broken crates and pallets, and scrap iron dotted around the perimeter. The mill’s boarded-up doors close off a majestically-scaled weaving shed – the biggest of its era in Europe – with mist hanging in the blue distance at the far end. Our boots crunched over ground-up fluorescent tubes, and large shards of wired glass which had fallen from the rooflights. Multi-coloured plastic bobbins were scattered over the floor, rolling in circles when the breeze caught them, and just beyond lay a series of deep, water-filled dyeing pits which look like a system of docks in miniature. Off to one side are pressed-metal stores strewn with woollen waste, as dirty as the coats of winter sheep.
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4678.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4660.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4629.jpg
Deeper into the mill are stacks of punched cards which once fed automated Jacquard looms (the looms were made in Paisley) – but very little machinery is left in this part. Inside a row of little rooms on the west of the weaving floor are steel chests full of the patterns which the Jacquards wove – printed out in garish colours by an inkjet plotter, looking old-fashioned and out of time. Beyond them lies a taller block held up by circular concrete columns, and clad in honey-coloured bricks – at the top was the beaming department, sitting brightly under ridge and furrow rooflights. Today, its timber parquet lies warped by the dampness, lifting at the corners and joints like an unpeeling stamp. There are inspection rooms to the side, flooded with light. The machine floors lay underneath, sitting above a joinery and engineering shop in the dingy basement, complete with sprinkler tanks emerging from an octopus of pipework.
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4622.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4606.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4586.jpg
Sound carried across the site, and after Cuban and I split up to explore the site, I heard the crunch of footsteps, and voices close by. I lay low in the mill’s showrooms, then heard dogs barking in the distance; the wind changed, and everything fell quiet again. Maybe it was nothing. Linked to the tall block via concrete bridges is a white-rendered tower which contained the mill's laboratories. These lay behind a wall of windows in typical Sixties style: a chequerboard of coloured spandrel panels and plate glass. Dusty chemical bottles and old lab instruments lie alongside sample rooms strewn with wool … skeins and strands and hanks and tufts, every colour you could wish for. A little like the room of wool at the back of Kirkheaton Mills. In this case, the new mill was built as man-made fibres came into use, and a large research effort went into developing lightfast dyes for use with nylon and other synthetics.
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4557.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4545.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4539.jpg
By contrast, the boiler house lies at the other side of the site, completely wrecked, and the stores beyond, stripped of wall and roof cladding, exposing their skeletons to the weather. All the columns and beams are stamped “Lanarkshire Steel Company” – who seem to have cast the structural sections in all my recent explores – like the paper mill, the transformer plant; the glittering prize and the fear factory. LSC is another lost name. You may think that the mill looks downbeat – but I particularly identify with Modernist factories like this. There's a delicacy to their steel-framed windows; the textures of zig-zag rooflights; the spindly metalwork and timber balustrades that were in vogue between the Festival of Britain and the dawn of Brutalism. More than anything, they expressed optimism in an industrial future which we struggle to feel nowadays.
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4527.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4512.jpg
http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i53/wolfie723/DP%202009/mill-4504.jpg
Finally, as we left the site, we met a group of four schoolgirls heading towards the mill. They stopped whooping and shrieking when they saw the cameras – “Why are ye takin photaes? Are ye fae the Standard?” I explained what we were doing, but they weren’t convinced …