Well, the Sky Broadband stopped working late on Friday night and it didn’t start again until the early hours of this morning, so it is a good job I went away for the weekend!
We spent seven hours in Bruges (or Brugge, as they call it) on Sunday, travelling overnight there and back on P&O North Sea Ferries. The weather disappointed a little as it drizzled some of the day, but the city did not. In that time, we visited the Belfry, the chocolate museum, the lamp museum, the Brugs Bier Festival and took a walk round the shopping areas, getting some Belgian chocolate to take back.
I looked for one photo to sum up the day and I chose this one- a pop up tableau chocolate box.
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.
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.
The town hall clock is playing up again in Morley. The chiming mechanism has been turned off because it keeps getting out of sync with the timekeeping mechanism after power cuts which appear to be happening with monotonous regularity. The local paper has the story here.
THE clock on Morley Town Hall is to remain silent until the money can be found by Leeds City Council for a major change in its mechanism.
I want to dig a bit more into this story and will talk to the Properties people to see what the options are. It sounds like they may be trying to replace the old mechanism with a new electronic one that can be turned off when required and whilst that has some merit the clock is a landmark in Morley whose future needs to be carefully considered as it is part of the Grade One listing.
I brought a dead cat back from Canada once, possibly the ideal pet. He was called Earl and we think he still lives in the house somewhere.
I talked about Kippers at length in my Isle of Man blogposts and we were pleasantly surprised to find a small Kippery in Whitby, apparently the only one left. It is known as Fortune’s and it was never actually open when we passed that way. It is on Henrietta Street, just along from the base of the 199 steps on the way to the East Pier. It has two small chimneys to the rear, seen smoking in these shots.
We had a trip to Flamingoland during our Witby holiday. David and his Cousin Katie loved the Splosh area, particularly the submarine ride with the hand cranked water pistols on it. Also, the pedal cycle ride went down well, showing that kids don’t need hi-tech to have fun.
I saw this sign in a Scarborough park and it reminded me of my dead cat…
I remember taking some pictures in New York a few years ago with my APS camera and I just dug them out. The one of the beams from the top of the Empire State is horribly blurry so not worthy of posting, whilst the one of the Battery Memorial has me in it smiling, not entirely right for a sad anniversary.
Ignore me and think of what happened to the Sphere and all the people who perished or were injured that day.
