It’s very warn and muggy here again today. I have a bunch of Holga pictures that I’d planned to post, but I’m sat in my my office which is currently 31.4°c and don’t have the energy to add them all to the blog. So, instead, here’s a summery picture of a fella in Whitby holding a hotdog. It looks like it was hot on that day too (I can’t recall – it was nearly ten years ago!), but the people in jackets and hoodies perhaps suggest it wasn’t as warm as it is here today.
I’ve posted pictures of this location on plenty of previous occasions. Today seemed apt for another as the local branch of Papa’s, which closed almost a year ago, seemingly for good (another branch in Sheffield closed not long afterwards) has announced that it’s re-opening this week.
The local branch is next to a shopping mall, rather than on a pier beside the North Sea, but beggars can’t be choosers.
Tomorrow they have a special offer of takeaway fish and chips for £1 all day. I’m going to be enjoying the fruits of an Indian restaurant tomorrow evening, so no fish and chips for me, but my wife and sons might be able to take advantage of the offer.
Leah’s Yard dates back to the early 1800s where it was a hub for the manufacture of shears and other hand tools. The place hosted a number of small workshops producing a wide range of goods – in Sheffield, these are known as “little mesters”, a local dialect version of “little masters” denoting the master craftspeople who worked and produced goods in such places. There were eighteen such little mesters in Leah’s Yard by 1905.
The workshops feature external staircases allowing access to the upper floors, and large windows are a feature to maximise the amount of daylight illuminating the workshops.
Over time these small industries gradually went away and Leah’s Yard, as with multiple other such sites in the city, fell into disuse and disrepair, and had stood empty for a couple of decades (although the little mesters workshops had been vacated of those trades long before).
Recently, plans were enacted to renovate the location as part of Sheffield’s “Heart of the City” development and the site re-opened recently. providing homes to a number of small independent businesses and retailers.
Yesterday was my first visit to the renovated Leah’s Yard, and it’s a charming location that I hope will thrive.
Sheffield has several rivers. The main river is the Don, but there are a number of smaller rivers that join it along it’s course, including the Loxley, the Rivelin, the Porter, and the Sheaf. The latter is where Sheffield derives it’s name: Sheaf Field.
For much of it’s length through the city centre, the Sheaf is subteranean, flowing through a series of man-made culverts and tunnels. One of these, named the Megatron, sometimes has guided tours!
The section of the Sheaf just above where it joins the Don is being uncovered as part of a new park on the site of the old castle site, and it can be seen in the photograph today beneath the ladder-like series of supports in the lower part of the image. The area to the left of the picture will form the park when the work is complete, and the river will act as a border and feature of the landscape.
I took this picture while attending this year’s Photo North festival in Leeds last month. I’ve taken similar images at this venue before, but I like how this one turned out with the placement of both people and gallery exhibits.
I took a trip to Newark Air Museum today. This wasn’t my first visit (I think it’s my third), and I’ve posted pictures from the previous visits here on my blog, but today was the first time I’ve visited with my dad.
Actually, having said the above, it’s actually my fourth visit, because today was a second trip with my dad following an aborted attempt last autumn when we drove all the way there only to find out upon arrival that there had been a problem with the museum’s water supply and that it was closed as a result.
Thankfully, there were no such issues today (although I did phone them in advance, just to be sure!) and we got to wander around the place at our leisure for a few hours. My dad, now in his mid-80s, served his National Service with the RAF in the late 1950s, and I think he enjoyed looking around the place. During a brief chat with another gentleman of similar age, where he revealed that he’d been in the RAF, the other fella asked if he’s been a pilot! He was not, although he did ride a service-issued bicycle (which he crashed while racing one of his fellow servicemen one day, which resulted in him hiding the damaged bike until he left the service 😀 ).
It was a nice day out and I should try to arrange other such visits to similar places for us both, I think.
I shot a roll-and-a-half of Tri-X with my Yashica Mat 124G while there, but the pictures below are all digital pictures from my Ricoh GR III compact.
English Electric Canberra PR.7 WH791 (under demolition)
The early morning light, and the deep burgundy and pastel pink shades of the ladies’ coats caught my eye as we passed this scene so I grabbed a quick picture to capture the moment.
Yesterday I wrote about how I was upgrading my site and that I’d migrated all the posts, media, comments, and subscribers. That all went well, except for one thing…
My plan had been to upgrade my existing free WordPress site to the paid-for Personal tier, mostly to remove ads that visitors see, and also to take advantage of some of the additional features a paid site provides.
What I actually somehow managed to do was create a whole new site! While almost everything moved across ok, I soon realised that all my stats etc. were gone and I effectively had a brand new site, albeit fully populated with thousands of posts. I debated whether to just leave it like that – stats are not my primary reason for the site, far from it, and they’re not exactly earth-shattering in any case. But it niggled me somewhat that, even though all my previous content was there, it somehow felt like I was starting again at day one.
So, to cut a long story short, I cancelled the purchase of the new Personal site, re-directed all my subscribers back to the original free site, got a refund, and then did the upgrade properly. Now my pre-existing free site is correctly migrated onto the Personal plan level and all my stats are exactly as they should be. Next time I do something like this I’ll take more time to RTFM before clicking the button. 🙂
Hopefully, as a benefit, you should now be able to read this, plus any new and previous posts free from the scourge of adverts, and I can have a poke around the extra stuff I’m paying for to see if any of it is of use.
Following yesterday’s sunset, it feel’s appropriate to go with a sunrise for the launch of my new (although really mostly just the same old) blog.
The archway in the picture shared today was the entrance to the ladies public conveniences that formed part of Sheffield Town Hall. In less conscientious times, when the needs of disabled people were perhaps not considered in the same way they are now, access to the toilets was down a flight of steps. While it’s possible that I might have passed through the arch when I was a small boy and needed a toilet escort from my mum, most of my recollections are of standing at the top of the steps waiting for her (or sometimes my nan, and later my wife) to come back out.
A similar set of toilets exists for males around the other side of the building on Surrey Street. While the Gent’s didn’t have the fancy arch of the Ladies’ conveniences, if did had two separate entrances / exits, both with the same sets of disabled-unfriendly steps.
Both sets of conveniences closed for public use many years ago, so are now inconvenient for that use. While the Ladies’ are, as far as I know, completely unused, the Gent’s has been converted to an underground bar. I expect they have a customer toilet.
Something good that happened today…
I’ve spend the day with a mixture of lounging around watching TV (this morning) and then helping clean the house and then visit my dad (this afternoon). As one of my sons has gone out for his leaving do from his previous job, we got a takeaway for his twin brother (and me), and the large kebab that I chose is currently filling my belly as I type this. I’ll take that as today’s good thing, although the other stuff (maybe excepting the cleaning) was good too.
I went out for a drive with my son who starts his new job on Monday. As it’s a considerably longer drive than to his previous place of work, I chaperoned him on a test run to make sure he was happy with the route. All went well.
Steel City Snapper photography 