A big picture dump today. All taken while I wandered around the railway station in Bury which is now part of the East Lancashire Railway heritage line.
I visit Bury each year to meet up with a bunch of middle-aged video game fans to spend the day in the marvelous, four-story Arcade Club, where we relive out youth playing free-to-play arcade games all day. I usually have time for a wander around before it opens though, and there’s often something interesting to see at the railway station – usually a steam train or two.
I came here with the intent of photographing views from the hillside over the city, and took a few pictures, but the best shot was this – looking in the opposite direction.
It really pays to look behind you when out with a camera. Sometimes the best views are the ones you’re walking away from.
This is the Castle Armoury in Bury, Lancashire, a Grade II listed building dating to 1907 and so named because it was built on the site of the former Bury Castle. Originally built to house the 8th Lancashire Rifle Volunteer Corps, which eventually evolved into the Lancashire Fusileers. They remained there until disbandment in 1967. Various other battalions and detachments were then housed in the building, including cadets and air training corps until the building was finally closed in 2022 on safety grounds due to lack of funding for repairs.
It’s quite a commanding structure, and all that stonework really pops with contrast in the right light.
A handful of remaining Woodhouse washlands pictures. Just snaps, really, but I like the tonality of them. The slight vignette of the XA3’s lens doesn’t go amiss here either.
I’ve noticed that WordPress (or possibly Flickr) seem to have altered something this week and I now have to use a different URL to embed my pictures. I used to use the Flickr share URL and paste it straight into my posts, but now I have to use the URL in the browser address bar. Anyone else had anything similar?
I might as well follow up yesterday’s post with this, taken on the same walk, just with a different camera. I’m quite pleased that I managed to get the symmetry pretty much perfectly aligned.
After yesterday’s post about the sad story of The Marples, here’s another Sheffield pub with a point of interest.
The name probably gives away the fact that there is a connection with the mail service, but the interesting fact is (and I’ve not verified this) is that it is the only pub in the country that is built into a Royal Mail building, in this case the Sheffield City Delivery Office. I once went into the delivery office as a child (my nan was a postwoman) and was fascinated by the sight of hundreds of bags of mail moving around the plave on a suspended rail system. How much fun it would have been to ride around the place in a mail bag, I thought.
The building in today’s photograph houses a pawn broker and a self-storage facility, but it was once a pub called The London Mart, although known as Marples by regulars (after it’s owner, John Marples). It is possibly the most famous bar in the city due to the tragedy which befell it during the Second World War.
On the night of Thursday December 12, 1940, the pub received a direct hit from a high-explosive bomb dropped by the German Luftwaffe. The building was destroyed, collapsing into a pile of rubble, killing 70 people from the estimated 77 who were inside at the time. It was initially thought that no-one could have survived the attack, but when rescue activities began the next day seven people were pulled from the wreckage of the building, including two who walked away unaided, never to be heard from again!
Following the destruction, the site lay derelict for 19 years until, in 1959, a new pub was built on the site, this time officially named The Marples. The pub remained open for the next 44 years until it closed for good in 2003, the building taking on a number of different uses in the following two decades. While the space previously occupied by the pub is now the Cash Shop pawn brokers, the upper floors have revived The Marple’s naming and are to become a housing co-operative.
Steel City Snapper photography 