Only two of the last 19 days’ pictures have been taken in Hebden Bridge, or three if you count yesterday’s in Mytholmroyd, which is just down the road. But I have a couple of weeks here now before my trip to Tanzania, so time to find some inspiration around home. I bet your town doesn’t look quite like this.
This is taken in the same churchyard as the photo a day short of a year ago: the same Saturday of the year, that is. And for the same reason, in that we were seeing Joe’s annual drama club show in the attached church hall. But I am not supposed to take and publish pictures of all that (child protection and all that) so here are some memorials instead. The fact that this has all their blank back sides on gives it a rather eerie feel, I think.
And why not. It was a warm day, and a Friday. I felt the same way today, I must admit.
If out in the hills and in doubt about the photo, try the sheep group. I always feel these guys know something. But that’s probably just paranoia. Probably.
Sir John Barbirolli was conductor of the Hallé orchestra, the UK’s oldest extant symphony orchestra, from 1943 until his death in 1970. The Hallé now reside at the Bridgewater Hall, built in 1996, and this bust of Barbirolli sits outside the venue — as you can see. I hope to be doing a fairly big project here over the next couple of years so expect to see more of this place, if all comes to pass.
This passage between the Manchester Central Library and the Town Hall has been closed for years, literally, while the library was refurbished, but it does now seem to be open again — at least, at this end. So this picture can be considered the latest documentary pic in the ongoing reconstruction of what seems to be the entirety of Manchester city centre.
Looks like the sale’s been working, but they’re sure dragging it out. Going purely on this blog, there’s no proof this jeweller ever doesn’t have a sale, in fact.
Normally our journey home from London wouldn’t take us through York but we ended up there because of a blockage on the line at Wakefield. It didn’t really extend our journey time much, to be fair. I took this shot while sat on our Hebden Bridge train waiting for it to leave, and like it because until I uploaded it onto the laptop this evening I didn’t realise how I’d captured this mother and son a couple of platforms away. I wasn’t particularly taking a photo of them, just of this group of people sat over there, and it’s nice sometimes when you get something unexpected.
The weekend in London continues. Visited the Victoria and Albert museum partly to see an exhibition and partly because I had never previously been there in my 46 years. The museum was opened in 1857 and has the largest collection of art and design objects in the world, the scale of which — 6.5 million objects — becomes apparent when you wander around the fairly large building and realise that even then only a tiny proportion of the collection is on display. This artist was one of a group sketching a sculpture which had made it out to public view.
Manchester yesterday was the exception — I’m back in London. This is Senate House, which contains the administrative offices and the main library of London’s university colleges. It was finished in 1937 and was one of the tallest buildings in the city at that time. In WW2 it was occupied by the Ministry of Information, and George Orwell’s wife Eileen worked there in the censorship department, thus inspiring the physical description of the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was also a key location in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.
