It's grim up north

I've been having another trip. Unlike most of mine, I'm not doing this one simultaneously, because I had people with me and so the opportunity to hunt around for a place with a signal where I could write and upload photos was limited as it would have been a bit antisocial. But seeing as folks here are often interested, I thought I'd post a few pictures of what I've been doing.

Off early yesterday to go to Durham. The little detour to Derby was to pick a friend up, and the one at Leeds was a wring turning caused by our being too busy talking:



Here's Durham:


Cute little streets, barely big enough for the Ford Transits to squeeze their way along. Despite being an atheist since the age of 8, I always go and look at cathedrals. Here's Durham Cathedral, undergoing repair:



And here's the Durham knocker where you're supposed to be able to do a Julian Assange and claim sanctuary by holding onto it and lifting yourself off the ground.

On a little further. This time to have a look at the Beamish Museum.



I remember seeing it many years ago when I was about sixteen and being impressed. They've got a lot more stuff, and built a good many more buildings. Let's start with something very basic about their attention to detail. Here's some reconstructed outhouses.



You can tell they're reconstructed because the mortar is modern. But as well as the coal holes with the little green doors they've got the patches of different coloured brickwork at a lower level. These represent where the earth closets would have had doors for the night soil man to come and shovel out the contents of the earth closet. You used to see this a lot when I was young - little signs on the buildings of their former uses. Somebody's noticed that and put it in. Of course, there were plenty of earth closets that were more or less operational too.



But it's not all about the toilets. Also interesting were the workshops.



And more:



And even more:



Oh how I'd love to have a workshop like these. Especially one where the machine tools were driven by long flappy belts from an overhead lineshaft.

There's a great deal to see. Steam shovels:



Steam engines:




Even more steam engines:





Motor cars:





Steam rollers:



And assorted railway wagons:

Isn't Atheism another form of religious belief. Cathedrals were a symbol of Norman power over the English folk by means of taxes. I would like to see more old photos of the industrial building though.

There's loads of attention to detail in the interiors too. Bedrooms:



Railway offices:



Solicitor's office:



Signal boxes:

saxavordian said:

Isn't Atheism another form of religious belief. Cathedrals were a symbol of Norman power over the English folk by means of taxes. I would like to see more old photos of the industrial building though.

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Absolutely, Durham Cathedral is very Norman - all those round arches,and it's built on a piece of high ground and looks like a castle. Yes, I'm putting up pictures of the museum visit, with all the industry one could wish for.

It's not just industry. Farming is well represented too. I made some new friends:



And looked at the collection of vintage farm machinery:





And even vintage lawnmowers:



This little fellow was busy steaming back and forth giving the tourists rides:

Strange really the only people who benefit from the historical are not the young who should be inspire by this but the old guard. I mean when you look at how all the structures currently standing like in the country of London Tower Bridge then Clifton bridge of Ironbridge and so on and so on. There is no way they can be remade today. And the same with historical sights on our flat earth in the various jungle strewn or desert lands.

saxavordian said:

There is no way they can be remade today.

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Of course they could given the Desire, need , motivation and a bucketful of cash.

Cheers

Interesting pictures, thanks for sharing. Funnily enough, I went there donkeys years ago as a kid too - I took some transparencies at the time (!) - but there wasn't that much in the way of buildings...

Good to see they have made some progress - our heritage is important.

That just scratches the surface of what they've got. One of the things I noticed when I was there as a teenager was that a lot of the buildings looked rather new and stark. The mortar and the paintwork were just a little too fresh. But now with the passage of time they've got weathered, and most importantly, dirty. So they look more like they've been there a long time.

Anyway, after that we got back in the Land Rover and had a trundle across the moors:



And had a look at the waterfall at High Force:



There was a little shrine to someone:



It's very pretty in the Tees valley:





That's it for today. Home James and don't spare the horses:

saxavordian said:

Isn't Atheism another form of religious belief. Cathedrals were a symbol of Norman power over the English folk by means of taxes. I would like to see more old photos of the industrial building though.

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no,its the logical position you only need faith to believe in a god or other unnatural force

saxavordian said:

Strange really the only people who benefit from the historical are not the young who should be inspire by this but the old guard. I mean when you look at how all the structures currently standing like in the country of London Tower Bridge then Clifton bridge of Ironbridge and so on and so on. There is no way they can be remade today. And the same with historical sights on our flat earth in the various jungle strewn or desert lands.

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my lads are ,but unless you take time to show them they unlikely to notice

great thread ,great pics and must have been a great trip mr brown

I suppose from my point of view, I always say to myself 'What's the minimum I need to believe in for this to work?'. It's about paring things down to the simplest explanation possible. Occam's chainsaw. Anyway, I wanted this to be about industrial archaeology mainly, rather than theology.

There are a lot of examples where people working in experimental archaeology and the heritage industry are making things using the techniques and materials of the past. A lot of the restoration work at Beamish and similar places is invaluable in making sense of how people made artefacts.
Yes, a lot of the appeal of places like this is to people of my age and older, who can often remember when things looked, sounded and smelt like they do in the reconstructions. But there were a great many kids there, and the staff and volunteers at the museum were making a good deal of effort to get them interested. Over the course of my lifetime I've seen it change from a wholesale destruction of the past in the interests of modernity when I was young to a situation like today where there's a lot more money and resources available to support history and archaeology. Of course, we could always do with more. But it's happening. For example, when I was young there were probably only a couple of preserved railways, Festiniog and Talyllyn. But now they're allover the place.

I can remember working in places like that, but we never thought 'o this is interesting'. As train drivers welcomed diesels after steam, we preferred the modern. Now, to visit these old places is fascinating, but actually living and working like that was never romantic. I do agree about the workshop, though; I'd love one like that!

Brown said:

That just scratches the surface of what they've got. One of the things I noticed when I was there as a teenager was that a lot of the buildings looked rather new and stark. The mortar and the paintwork were just a little too fresh. But now with the passage of time they've got weathered, and most importantly, dirty. So they look more like they've been there a long time.

Anyway, after that we got back in the Land Rover and had a trundle across the moors:



And had a look at the waterfall at High Force:



There was a little shrine to someone:



It's very pretty in the Tees valley:





That's it for today. Home James and don't spare the horses:

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Thank you for that little trip down memory lane .

It's probably easier nowadays to get interested in handiwork of various kinds, from car maintenance to carpentry than it used to be. Again, I'm going to sound very old here, but I started as a youth with the limited range of tools you could get from Woolworths. Or maybe you were lucky enough to live near a Halfords or a builder's merchant with tools for sale. Drills that melted on contact with metal workpieces, hammers whose heads came off, hacksaw blades whose teeth came off, all that kind of thing. Nowadays of course the internet provides a cornucopia of tools that i didn't even know existed, and all very affordably priced by comparison too. I looked at chainsaw prices when I was sixteen and discovered that I'd need around £400-£500. About a month's wages for most people in our area. So I went to a hire shop and hired one. "Are you sure you're eighteen, son?". If you wanted to drill big holes in masonry you'd need something like this:



Well beyond the scope of most people unless you worked in the mining industry. Yet last year I bought myself an SDS Max rotary hammer for under £300. OK, it's more for occasional use than everyday professional use, but it tells you something about how activities like this have got more accessible.

X1 nice thread. Definetly not grim. So many parts of the country the industrial heritage is not only gone it's been physically wiped out.

Thanks gentlemen for your interest and your comments. I'm always surprised at the amount of interest my trundles around the countryside generate. I should get the chance for a few more this summer too.