More stories from an industrial landscape

I suppose I am on a roll and have slid into a series of stories about that industrial landscape many of us grew up with.*

In my case it was the narrow rows of terraced houses, mills and foundries bounded by London Road, Traffic Street and the railway.  This was where my grandparents lived, and it was where every summer holiday I went until the age of 11.

They lived in Hope Street, one of a series of long roads of densely packed two up two downs which all seemed to have a pub on the corner and lead to a noisy big place of work.

Now child hood memories are supposed to be of long hot sunny days without a rain cloud in the sky, but mine are of those grimy streets which seemed to go on forever and dank cold entries which led from the busy road into the communal yard at the back.

And because I was sometimes packed off from London in the winter I remember those wet and cold days when lazy palls of smoke from countless domestic fires and factory chimneys hung over the roof tops giving off that sooty smell and adding another layer of grime to everything including the few trees by the Royal Infirmary and Arboretum.

No matter how many times I was told I always got seduced by the challenge of climbing them and was always surprised at how the stuff came off on your hands and clothes.

All of which you accepted and took in your stride.  This after all was how we lived and the idea that there could be places without noisy factories or that an open space was more than just a small pocket of tired looking grass didn’t even occur to me.

Looking back it is the way that so much industry existed side by side with where you lived.  Tucked away behind a row of houses were the yards where men repaired things with hammers and torches, at the end of most roads was a factory or mill of sorts and there was always the railway with its long lines of shunting yards whose locos worked long into the night.

For some the railway station was that magic place offering the promise of journeys to faraway places, but for us in Hope Street it meant that distinctive clunk sound as another loaded wagon was pushed and sent to its destination in the far corner of the marshalling yard.

Of course the upside was that you were never far from work.  No long bus ride or expensive commuter journey for my granddad and his neighbours. Work was just minutes away and like as not was a journey made in the company of the men who he spent the working day with.

And they were the same men who you would drink with and see at football matches and around the town. There is a story that during one shipbuilders strike in the North East the pubs opened early so that the striking men had somewhere to go to play darts, drink tea and fill the day in the place of work in the ship yard.

But let’s not over romanticise the picture.  Places like Hope Street in Derby and Butterworth Street hard by Bradford Colliery were no rural idyll and if the sun shone on a bright spring day it was accompanied by the noise of factories, and illuminated the canal side and gasworks.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson


*Industrial Landscapes,  http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Industrial%20landscapes