Pictures provided by: sixcyl
Author | Message |
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◊ 2008-05-10 10:50 |
Nice film, when evocating working class wasn't seen as oldfashioned. Extraordinary Ice-Cream horse-drawn vehicle...in 1962. It reminds me that when I was 6/7years old (around 1964), every day I passt along a farrier house on the way to school, in my district in Bordeaux (Bacalan) Here some beautiful pictures |
◊ 2008-05-10 12:02 |
sixcyl, do you have any idea of the location? Those thumbnails are very fine and very evocative ... I can just remember cobbled streets lined with little terraced houses, and usually a pub on every corner; back streets only used for emptying the dustbins and as playgrounds for kids ... and the innumerable chimneys that people like Fred Dibnah and 'Blaster' Bates later made a good living destroying. |
◊ 2008-05-10 15:36 |
Yes, the locations are Blackburn and Preston in Lancashire. Many of these chimeys are from cotton industry and probably most of them have been destroyed by a Fred Dibnah or others since then I've "googled" on F.Dibnah and learn many interesting facts about this man that I'd never heard of |
◊ 2008-05-10 20:19 |
When I was driving vans in the 80s and early 90s, I went to both Preston and Blackburn at least once a week, and the chimneys and mills and streets of two up/two down houses had pretty much vanished even by then. It was a shame in some ways; the fashion of gutting factories and converting them into (expensive!) apartments hadn't yet begun, and the idea of modernising and refurbishing terrace houses - rather than demolishing them and building horrible soulless blocks of flats instead - hadn't occurred to planners at that time; 'slum clearance' was the watchword. The flats, of course, became worse slums than what they replaced |
◊ 2008-05-10 23:30 |
The romantic looking mistiness of these streets was lung rotting smog, most of the houses would not have inside lavatories or hot running water, and people worked long hours in those mills for very little money. While I agree with you that the blocks of flats turned quickly into vertical rather than horizontal slums, the ingredient that was missing in the fifties was money. Disposable income was much less then, and the working class of people relied on landlords to rent property to them since they couldn't afford to buy. The concept of buying a house and doing it up in the manner shown on so many TV programmes had only just started to take hold. |
◊ 2012-12-27 18:23 |
Here's a link to Cairo, Orme and majestic Mills photo taken in 2010. If you look carefully at the still from "Tomorrows Saturday" with the two men at the front door overlooking the mills, you can make out "Cairo" on a water tower, "Orme" on a chimney and what may be "Majestic" on the left hand chimney. The link takes you to a photo shot in Oldham Link to "en.wikipedia.org" |