Shades of Grey

Last Thursday morning, I noticed a huge plume of smoke to the west of Bradford as I drove into work. As I drove through the city centre, the air was a hazy yellow tinge and there was an acrid odour.

As I rounded the corner on the road leading to our office, I was relieved to see that our headquarters building looked intact. Looking out of our office windows though, the devastation was apparent. Where once stood a proud if somewhat jaded mill building, there was now a silhouette of walls with bits missing and stubbled tops, like an ancient cathedral ruin in the mist. The site was surrounded by fire tenders with their telescopic ladders hosing water, a real ten pumper. There were no longer flames visible, but the wreckage was belching toxic fumes into the sky.

The story can be found here and here.

This building was, surprisingly enough, still a working woollen mill. Bradford made its fortune on wool, but now one more of the remaining traders has bitten the dust.

The Police are treating the fire as suspicious: it was possibly started by a burnt out stolen car. The business was a going concern and the owners had rebutted offers from developers to sell their site in what is otherwise a declining area but ripe for demolition and redevelopment. Having a fire like this is convenient fore somebody. Quack quack?

During the day of the fire, we would occasionally peep out of the window, to see what was going on. By hometime, the smoke had abated somewhat but there were still tenders pumping into the wreckage.

On Friday, the demolition Contractors arrived to make the site safe, pushing down the remains with big articulated arms, but still the site smouldered and two hoses remained.

Today, the site is just a large pile of rubble with the recoverable metalwork being seperated off for scrap. As you can imagine, a Victorian Mill has a lot of cast iron columns and girders to recycle but they will probably have to be smelted first.

Reading about this after the event, the Fire Brigade said that it burnt so ferociously because there were 3,000 bales of wool stored in the factory and the flooring was heavily impregnated with Lanolin, otherwise known as wool wax or wool grease. Whilst both wool and lanolin are considered fire resistant in normal use, in an inferno they will burn ferociously.

Reading this, I recall my early days at GEC Coventry where we were based at an old pre-war factory in Spon Street. This was the 2nd biggest fire risk in the City Centre as it had been the original Rudge Whitworth motorbike Factory and all of the floors were impregnated with engine oil. It then became the biggest fire risk after the previous number one risk burnt down!

It was a rather ugly factory, being constructed of early concrete columns and brick cladding/Rittal industrial windows with what could best be described as a large shed on the roof of the main six story block (the Canteen). However, it was listed as being of special architectural interest because of its post-iron column design. It survived the blitz (despite all around being bombed) but eventually succombed to the developer’s wrecking ball when the site became a large retail development and Coventry skydome arena.

Coventry had some very strict byelaws about inflammable materials within the city centre core, presumably based on the carpet bombings of the fateful night in 1941 when much of the City Centre was destroyed. I can remember needing some meths for a Mamod steam engine once and was bemused to find that boots only sold it in metal containers, not the normal glass ones. (I was even more surprised that if you wanted it in Norway, you had to go to the State off-license to buy it, “Rødspirit”). I once went and stood on the highest point I could access in the City Centre and tried to imagine what it could have been like during the blitz. Despite how many war films or shocking photos you have seen, the reality cannot really sink in. I did the same in Bradford last week, seeking a high viewpoint and wondering how one solitary fire could bring the tinge of destruction to such a large area. Every fire tender in the area was in attendance and they were calling in other fire response teams from elsewhere in west Yorkshire. How would the emergency response teams cope in a major calamity if there had been ten fires, or a hundred? The answer is of course that they couldn’t.

Let us hope that they never have to.