Tag Archives: museum

Dec 20 2025
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Daily Post, Family Member, Portrait

Back of my head, x3

Friday 19th December 2025, 3.30pm (day 5,230)

Triplicate selfie, 19/12/25

Spent the first few hours of my Xmas break having an extended lie-in, then spent the next few wandering around Bradford, a place I have come to quite like down the years. This complicated selfie was taken in the National Media Museum (which lately has become the ‘National Science and Media Museum’ so it can continue to squeeze funding out of our reluctant state apparatus): a kind of ‘digital hall of mirrors’ installation. As you can see, despite my advancing years, my body still refuses to shed much hair.

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Sep 28 2025
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Daily Post, Interior

In the Water and Steam Museum

Friday 26th September 2025, 11.20am (day 5,146)

Water and steam museum, 26/9/25

A city the size of London is going to need a lot of water. And unlike, say, Manchester, there are no high hills particularly nearby, in which one can build reservoirs and let gravity do quite a bit of the work of moving that water to where it is needed (water comes all the way to Manchester from the Lake District a hundred miles away through gravity alone). Therefore, some serious pumping is required. What used to be the Kew Bridge pumping station, and is now the London Water and Steam Museum, contains the biggest beam engine ever built, a gargantuan see-saw with a steam engine at one end and the pump at the other. That colossal object was impossible to photograph adequately, but these instruments will do.

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Jun 22 2025
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Daily Post, Interior

Wool for the loom

Saturday 21st June 2025, 12.40pm (day 5,049)

Loom, 21/6/25

With little else to do today (the football season hasn’t started yet), I visited the Calderdale Industrial Museum and learned some things about local industry around the Halifax area that I didn’t know before. Like, John Mackintosh became very rich and successful, founding the company that bore his name, and whose successors still manufacture Quality Street chocolates in Halifax, thanks only to the cooking of his wife Violet. She was the one who invented modern toffee — he was the one who called himself “The Toffee King”, though.

But for the photo, I’ll go with this mass of red and blue strands of wool, all converging into the Jacquard loom that is currently operating to the right, having been turned on for a few minutes during which time it produced plenty of noise and a few dozen lines of carpet.

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Jun 09 2025
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Daily Post, Portrait, Stranger

The Great Tapestry of Scotland

Sunday 8th June 2025, 2.30pm (day 5,036)

A stop off on the way north to Dundee. There are various routes available, things not yet seen, including the Great Tapestry, with 160 panels created collectively by over a thousand people between 2012-13. So not as old as this blog, but with more history in it, if you see what I mean. What is seen here is just the first few panels, chronologically. Having toured the country for a while it is now on permanent display in Galashiels, which makes that the 499th different place to feature on here, and number 500 should be along before the week is out, possibly tomorrow.

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Apr 20 2025
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Daily Post, Transport

Superhero snowplough

Saturday 19th April 2025, 10.25am (day 4,986)

Superhero snowplough, 19/4/25

My Easter Saturday trip out found me in the Locomotion museum in Shildon, Co. Durham, at 10.30ish. This snowplough looks almost absurdly macho, like it’s Thor’s snowplough (Marvel Comics version). Look at the light beams that shoot off as it steams along! The watching human simply stands in awe and wonder as it zooms past. “Me? Put ME in a museum!? The impudence!”

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Jan 07 2025
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Daily Post, Flora/Fauna

Creature from the inside of Tim Burton’s head

Tuesday 7th January 2025, 12.35pm (day 4,884)

Tim Burton spider, 7/1/25

Another movie reference, courtesy of the exhibition currently running at the Design Museum in London, featuring a range of drawings, models, photos and other artefacts that have poured out of the head of director Tim Burton over the last 50 years or so. Two things are apparent; 1) the guy can have done very little in his life other than pour out this endless stream of creative work, more or less constantly; 2) there is some seriously weird shit going on inside that head. Worth seeing though.

An early post today as I now sit at Heathrow Airport waiting for an overnight flight. Unless something goes seriously wrong, the next three weeks of posts will all be coming from places a damn sight warmer than this one.

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Jul 03 2024
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Daily Post, Interior, Transport

The Mary Rose

Wednesday 3rd July 2024, 11.15am (day 4,696)

Mary Rose, 3/7/24

The Mary Rose went down in the Solent during a battle in 1545 and then sat on the sea floor for 437 years until what remained of it was raised in 1982. I remember watching this event on TV in my teens and then not long after, on my only previous visit to Portsmouth, visiting a mouldering hulk that was hanging in a big shed being sprayed constantly with water to stop it drying out catastrophically. Four decades on and the Mary Rose‘s transition from the mud of the sea floor to hanging off a wall has been completed, and what we’re all rewarded with is one of the most interesting museums I’ve ever visited, for sure. The amount of stuff — not just weapons, but personal effects, foodstuffs, even the skeleton of the ship’s pet ratcatching dog — that came up with the wreck is astonishing. Not an easy thing to photograph with my mediocre equipment, but I gave it a shot.

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Jul 01 2024
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Daily Post, Interior

William Morris gallery

Friday 28th June 2024, 3.45pm (day 4,691)

William Morris gallery, 28/6/24

The Ideal Book? Good question. This afternoon’s visitors to the WIlliam Morris gallery in Walthamstow, London, get the chance to ponder this question. Morris himself gave a lot of care and attention in his later life to producing the ideal book. If you ask me it’s Shogun, but that’s just a personal and rather non-literary opinion.

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May 17 2024
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Daily Post, Friend, Portrait

Professor Dan’s lecture

Thursday 16th May 2024, 7.15pm (day 4,648)

Dan Yon, 16/5/24

The island of St Helena was discovered in May — at least according to tradition, May 21st 1502. Hence its name, as that’s the feast day of St Helena. So this may have prompted May 2024 being declared ‘St Helena Culture Month’, and here’s probably the world’s most senior St Helenian academic, Professor Dan Yon, doing his bit for it with a public lecture in the museum in Jamestown tonight. Not that he teaches here — Toronto is his usual base.

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Nov 02 2023
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Daily Post, Interior

Spinning machinery

Wednesday 1st November 2023, 2.20pm (day 4,451)

Spinning machinery, 1/11/23

November opens with a far more interesting day than October closed. A day off work was called for, with Clare’s company. This is taken in the Bradford Industrial Museum, which is free to entry, easy to reach from home and has been there all the 23 years we’ve lived there, only I’ve never been there before. Worth a visit though.

On this shot, the game is to spot the asymmetries that are not the fault of the photographer. As in the puzzles in magazines — how many can you see…? I have at least six that trouble me.

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