A Meeting on the Rhine

An intriguing studio portrait of a group of serious minded young women, on the reverse is a pencilled date of January 1894.  They are soberly dressed with padded shoulders and smocking to the fore and have the appearance of educated middle class women but there are no obvious clues as to the reason for their gathering. Some  look out of the photo with impressive self-assurance, others look more diffident or apprehensive. Perhaps it was a social event - a reunion of a sort - but there’s no evidence of frivolity. The studio responsible was located in Neuwied, a small town on the banks of the Rhine near Koblenz.  Germany in 1894 was a rapidly expanding industrial and military power and it may be no more than a coincidence but the nation’s first major group to campaign for the rights of women, the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF) was founded in March of 1894. Needless to say, it ceased to exist in 1933.

 

Great Railway Stations No. 20, Newcastle Central Station

Two abiding memories of this grand and impressive station.  First from a Saturday evening in 2015 when I wandered into the vastness of the Centurion Bar that occupies the former First Class Passenger Lounge.  The lavish ornamentation for which it is famous, including some spectacular Burmantofts faience, was lost in the gloom - every table was packed with voluble drinkers whose voices strained to be heard over the grossly amplified music that oscillated on the threshold of pain and stunned the senses.  In the 1960s the lounge was converted to provide the British Transport Police with a suite of prison cells for miscreants. Second is a childhood memory of stepping through the slick of blood that smeared the pavement and puddled on the cobbled street as it flowed from a nearby slaughterhouse in the vicinity of the station. The latter image is attached to my late 1950s recollections of time spent watching trains pass through on the East Coast mainline - an exciting procession of prestigious expresses and filthy freight trains dragging long lines of coal wagons destined for local furnaces and power stations.

The most striking feature of the station interior is the elegant curving form of three cast-iron barrel vaults each supported on slender columns - the eye is drawn to the central glazing sections and the formal repetitions enhance the sense of generous overhead space.  The platforms are spanned by a footbridge that inscribes a gentle arc across the tracks.  Platforms 7 and 8 were built to accommodate four tracks of which two remain in place, enhancing the sense of scale and space.  There’s an air of grandeur that reflects the ambition and confidence of the North Eastern Railway.  All these features were part of the station as originally completed in 1850 (a year before Paxton’s Crystal Palace) and have survived all subsequent rebuilding.  This was all the work of a versatile local architect, John Dobson, who also designed churches, chapels and cemeteries, shops, markets and arcades, and banks, gaols and country houses. The building is protected by a Grade 1 listing dating from 1954 and is one of only 10 examples to earn a 5 star rating from Simon Jenkins in his 2017 anthology, Britain’s 100 Best Railway Stations.

 

Cornish Mining in the St. Just District

In the 1890s the Great Western Railway operated a weekly train to Southampton calling at Redruth and Camborne to collect Cornish miners on the first stage of their journey to the gold and diamond mines of South Africa.  Cornish mining technology was among the most advanced in the world and Cornish mining engineers were in demand throughout the 19th. century.  In the same period, unemployed Cornish miners were recruited to work in Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Brazil, United States and Canada, in step with fluctuations in the local labour market.  Copper and tin had been mined in Cornwall for centuries before the invention of steam power made it possible to access deposits via vertical shafts rather than by digging into hill sides.  Ancillary industries - steam engine building, pump and rock drill manufacturers, compressor and boiler producers flourished - mostly located in the Camborne and Redruth area where the major mines were concentrated.

When the great Cornish land owning families, the Bassets, Rashleighs, Boscawens, Treffrys, et al  invested in mineral extraction, the last thing on their minds was landscape value - they had quite enough of that on their secluded country estates.  While the majority of mines were to be found inland there were two clusters of mines along the north Cornish coast around St. Just and St. Agnes. The environmental damage inflicted on the landscape in a county widely celebrated for the rugged beauty of its dramatic coastline must have seemed especially egregious to the anti-industrial segment of Victorian opinion typified by John Ruskin. The legacy of all this can be seen today in the ruins of engine houses, chimney stacks and industrial buildings that cling to the granite cliff tops between St. Just and Zennor on the north facing coast of West Penwith where these photos were taken. 

Curiously, in accordance with another strand in Ruskin’s thinking - the need to conserve the past - these ruins have acquired new significance as powerful enhancements to the landscape. With the passage of time a new narrative has emerged and these sites have acquired a beauty of their own as well as bearing witness to past experience and endeavour.  They form a lens through which we can examine the working lives and culture of mining communities and the economic forces that brought the mines into existence. These photos are a record of the industrial relics that follow the coastline between Geevor Mine and Levant Mine.  Geevor was one of the very last Cornish mines to maintain production and continued investment in the 1980s but global economic conditions forced it to close in 1990.  Some of the associated infrastructure remains in place and forms the core of a museum exhibit under the broader umbrella of the UNESCO designated Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape. 

 

Mass Transit in Victorian Britain

There are 20 visible passengers, including the coachman, piled high in defiance of gravity on this horse-drawn carriage.  Some look sullen, some apprehensive while others appear quite pleased with themselves.  Another 17 bystanders, plus a groom, line the foreground and face the camera. More socially diverse than the passengers behind, they look as if they just drifted into the frame. There are no clues as to location anywhere on the card but the buildings, with their extensive rustication, suggest a business district in a substantial city around the turn of the twentieth century.  The camera operator has achieved a remarkable degree of focus enabling each of these faces to be seen in surprising detail.  I read somewhere that Apple has a team of 6,000 employees working on the development of the iPhone camera yet they might struggle to produce a better image than this.

 

Building a Tunnel in New Zealand

There’s a tunnel mouth with a block built portal and some stone retaining walls under construction beneath a steeply rising hillside. A temporary narrow-gauge railway has been built to carry away the spoil and bring materials to the site. Many of the labourers appear to be non-European and a gent in a top hat appears to be supervising activities. The workforce have paused their toil for the camera and a handful of bystanders observe the event from above. The photo bore no caption but I am reliably informed that it shows a tunnel linking the city of Christchurch with the port of Lyttleton on New Zealand’s South Island.  Work on the mile long tunnel began in 1861 and trains started running in 1867.  It would be 1874 before it was fully complete due to a combination of persistent ingress of water and the challenge of drilling through exceptionally hard rock. There are no passenger trains but it remains in operation for freight trains transporting cargoes from Lyttleton Port.  Wikipedia has more.

 

Brussels Midwinter

Scenes from the wintry streets of the Belgian capital just after the war, part of a batch of found photographs taken by a British serviceman on duty in Northern Europe.  They make an interesting record of the city in painful transition from war into peace.  Powdery snow gathers between the cobblestones and freezes in the gutters while pedestrians hunch up against the cold. The swastikas have been burned and the streets are free of the emblems of occupation. Commercial life is returning and the trams are running.  There are posters on display in the Place de Brouckère for Un Bal Surréaliste at the Academie du Beaux Arts (Salle de la Madeleine) on February 8th. - a frivolity that could never have happened under occupation. With privately owned vehicles in short supply, traffic is light and there are long queues at the tram stop. Some landmark buildings can be identified including the Monumental Palais de Justice and the Hotel Metropole (which closed in 2020). The photographer has composed with care and discovered unexpected poetry in the near deserted cobbled streets dusted with snow.

 

Airborne over the Great Orme

Situated to the north west of the North Wales seaside resort of Llandudno is the Great Orme, a chunky limestone headland, operated as a country park and nature conservation area. Copper mining has left behind a vast and only partially explored network of tunnels that have been made into a visitor attraction. A tramway opened in 1902 to link the town below with the summit and now provides an anachronistic visitor experience in open sided vehicles driven by a continuous running cable embedded in the trackway.  In 1969 a Cable Car began to offer an additional connection with the town with 20 cabins in circulation at intervals of one minute. For the voyeuristically inclined this aerial parade of 4 person pods makes for an interesting spectacle.  From the slopes below it’s easy to observe the various behaviours the overhead voyagers display - some are absorbed in recording a movie on their mobiles while others affect an air of lofty indifference as they sail by.  Visually, the point where the cars cross is the most striking as the space between contracts and expands.  These photos were taken in September 2016.

 

Der Pott, Industriekultur im Ruhrgebiet

A massive block of a book - 640 pages of colour photographs of heavy industry in the Ruhr, mostly relics of the past but a few from the present.  Deindustrialisation wiped out an enormous amount of industrial structures in the region. Some of the more viable plant was exported to China but much of what remained was repurposed as spectacular heritage visitor attractions. More than 70 sites have been combined into a 400 kilometre heritage trail that reaches from Duisburg in the east to Hamm in the west.  Co-ordinating the scheme depended on a level of regional organisation that seems to be impossible in Britain where such sites are numerous but rarely work together.  Another factor that is less common in Germany is the British tendency to eliminate all traces of defunct industrial activity at the earliest opportunity. In part this reflects the shortage of development land in Britain and a pattern of land ownership that is always looking to extract maximum value from land assets. The same forces are at work in Germany but they are subject to stronger regulation in terms of public interest.

There’s long been a sense in Britain that industrial relics are intrinsically unsightly and unworthy of preservation and often the best examples get swept away with the worst.  In the north-east of England an enormous amount of industrial heritage was lost after the deindustrialisation of the region in the 60s and 70s as the ship yards, coal mines and steel works disappeared - it was left to Beamish Museum to salvage what it could but a regionally planned scheme would have been much more comprehensive.  It sometimes felt as if a Ground Zero policy was unofficially sanctioned as if removing the visual evidence of past industry would smooth the transition to a post-industrial future of low-wage insecure employment by breaking the links with lost occupations and the cultural traditions that sustained them.  It’s a process that still goes on - the Mayor of Tees Valley recently posed with indecent pride in front of the closed steelworks at Redcar and proudly announced its total demolition, having rejected all proposals for preservation as a visitor attraction.  The need for regeneration land is held to be paramount despite the vast amount that already exists.

Back to the book - each section has a map or plan, some historic images and explanatory text in English (as well as German and French). Stylistically the photography is primarily intended to record but without the studied neutrality of tone and compositional uniformity found in the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher.  There’s a sense of frontality emphasised by rigorous perspective correction. An interesting comparison is with the photographs of Albert Renger-Patzsch who recorded several of these sites soon after construction in pristine condition before the stresses of intensive operation and the ravages of fire, water, steam and oxidisation brought them to their present state.  Photographs make clear the tension that exists between the architecture of industrial buildings (admin blocks, pit-head enclosures, turbine halls) and the anti-architecture of industrial structures (blast furnaces, smelters, coke ovens, gas tanks, overhead conveyors, cooling towers).  While the buildings are often sensitively proportioned and detailed to incorporate contemporary idioms (Jugendstil, Gründerzeit, Brick Gothic), the industrial plant, despite being meticulously planned in terms of operational requirements, often has an improvisational, bricolage-like appearance, as if random forms have been welded together, as much in hope as expectation.  Functionality is the only consideration whereas architects like to set their sights on higher things in the pursuit of artistic expression. 

So what’s the appeal of the industrial landscape - why is it endlessly fascinating for some while others respond with indifference or outright hostility? Mine is the last generation to be born and raised in a world where the industrial landscape was commonplace, especially so in the north-east where I lived.  Every journey to and from school would pass collieries, shipyards and factories - an unceasing spectacle where welding torches flashed in smoke filled gloom while overhead cranes and hoists propelled massive components in a display of perpetual motion. Pit-head winding gear could be seen spinning at speed, hauling cage-loads of coal to the surface where it was washed, graded and tipped into railway wagons around the clock.  All this industrial activity was so deeply embedded into the locality that to the eyes of a child it seemed it would continue unchanged, for ever.  This is the power of the industrial sublime - to induce nostalgia for jobs that were massively physically demanding and ruinous to health in an environment where water courses were lethally polluted, where the sea was stained charcoal grey from colliery waste and the air quality was laden with toxic fumes. Despite this, displaced industrial workers can often be heard waxing lyrical on the lost camaraderie of the workplace where unions enjoyed 100% support and stood together to resist management’s unreasonable demands. They often recall taking pride in the finished article as the embodiment of their skills and expertise. The continuing appeal of the industrial landscape has cultural, social and aesthetic elements of which the last may prove the most enduring - there’s nothing else in the man-made environment that’s left behind so many extraordinary physical structures enhanced by the patina of ageing and replete with formal repetition wrapped in complex networks of contrasting forms (tubes, cones, pipes, cylinders, grids, filters) on such a vast scale.

See also:

Gelsenkirchen 1914

Past and Present No. 10: Henrichenburg Schiffshebewerk

Ruhrgebiet in Close-up

Margaretenhöhe - refuge from dystopia

Essen Zollverein