One of a small cluster of chairs in the open park area at Park Hill Flats. I’ve photographed these chairs at least a couple of times before – there’s something about their stark wiriness and colours (not that you can see that here) that catches my eye each time.
This is the first time I’ve noticed that they’re actually staked to the ground though. I guess they’ve always been that way, and it makes sense given their placement in a public location, but sometimes you look and don’t see sometimes.
Nikon F80 & Nikkor 24-120mm f/4 ED VR on Fujifilm Acros II. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
At this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, one of the gardens featured a giant wooden sculpture of the goddess, Gaia, or Mother Nature and she’s often known. The sculpture featured flowing willow‑branch hair which was crafted by the aptly named artist, Tom Hare, while her leaf‑crowned face and shoulders were carved from a fallen mature tree by sculptor Tim Wood.
And now the entire artwork has been transported north to Sheffield where it will permanently reside in the middle of the Park Hill Flats complex. So, on a visit to the town centre a few weeks ago, I decided to take a detour and go have a look.
Thanks to the hot dry conditions we’ve endured this summer, some of the surrounding grass was a dry yellow, although Gaia herself was somewhat aptly surrounded by lush green growth. There were quite a few people visiting the sculpture, including some who appeared to be part of a guided tour!
The figure is part wood, and part dry stone wall, with her torso meticulously carved with intricate swirling designs.
Up close, she makes for an interesting, if very large, portrait subject.
I took a whole slew of pictures on both film and digital, but these black and white Acros II shots are my favourites, I think.
I’ve been past her again since this first visit and took more pictures, she’s a subject that will reward the photographer, I think.
Nikon F80 & Nikkor 24-120mm f/4 ED VR on Fujifilm Acros II. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
This forms part of the Park Hill Flats complex in Sheffield, a 1960s monument to brutalist architecture. The other side of one of these bridges once bore a piece of graffiti that read “I love you will U marry me?” which over time became part of the city’s cultural identity and you could buy mugs, t-shirts, and other memorabilia featuring the slogan. It even has its own Wikipedia page. When the flats were acquired for redevelopment, the developer, Urban Splash kept the graffiti and gave it a neon overlay.
Sadly, despite the hopeful message, it’s quite a sad tale.
Anyway, that’s on the other side of the bridge. This side is graffiti free.
Nikon F80 & Nikkor 24-120mm f/4 ED VR on Fujifilm Acros II. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
A quartet of pictures I shot one morning on my way into the office.
Park Hill Flats are a notable (and some might say, notorious) landmark in Sheffield, being one of the major landmarks visible when entering the city by rail or by road down the main arterial route from the motorway.
When originally constructed in the late 1950s, / early 1960s they replaced older back-to-back tenement housing and gave the residents the luxury of their own private bathrooms and heating. Due to the construction on a hillside it was possible to reach every floor apart from the highest from somewhere at ground level and the wide frontages to the flats were wide enough for electric milk-floats to be driven, and the name “streets in the sky” was coined.
Over time, a mixture of poor maintenance, and rising antisocial behaviour and crime blighted the development. Over time it became more difficult to house tenants on the site. In recent decades, a part-privatisation of the development has taken place, with the blocks being gradually refurbished and improved into a mixture of upmarket housing, social housing, and business units, and there are now much improved facilities on the site.
Whatever your thoughts on the brutalist architectural design, the place is certainly striking, and for a photographer provides ample opportunities for interesting pictures to be made.
Something good that happened today…
I heard today that one of the people in our team impacted by the recent redundancies has secured himself a new role, so I’m very happy for him. He’s a great young man with a lot of promise and deserves every opportunity.
This is the second version of this post. The first one was about how the short and gloomy winter days are getting me down somewhat this year, but it made for somewhat depressing reading, so I scrapped it.
The days can be very gloomy during the winter though – it’s just after 4pm as I write this and it’s almost fully dark outside. Normally this wouldn’t be the case for another hour at this time of the year, but we’ve got some heavy rain today and the clouds have blocked what little natural illumination we might otherwise have had.
We were due to go out shortly for a family meal, but one of my boys went out with friends last night and had a few celebratory drinks too many so we’ve had to cancel and re-book as he has had a hangover all day. With the wisdom of age I can easily preach to him about the foolishness of drinking too many beers and the price that comes with them, but I’ve got plenty of hangovers of my own under my belt from when I was young which prevent me getting on too high a horse. So the meal will take place tomorrow instead when hopefully we will all be in a fit state to enjoy it.
My other son will now be having some takeaway pizza instead which, from the look on his face when I told him, I think he prefers anyway. Not sure if the rest of us will have the same (or if Mister Hungover will want some – pizza is great at the end of a night out drinking, but I can’t remember if it maintains its allure the following day), but we shall see shortly.
Today’s picture is of Park Hill Flats, a sheffield architectural landmark that has featured here on the blog on a few occasions previously. I made this photo after the shot of the magick studio, and before the picture of the pigeons I posted yesterday. It was taken from the footbridge over the road and shot through the railings.
As I briefly mentioned the other day, the skies are currently almost empty of aircraft, something noticeable on clear days. Today not so much as it’s mostly cloudy (and considerably chillier!) so the sight has been lessened somewhat. To mark the lack of flights, today I post a picture of eleven flights.
Of stairs.
As I type this I’ve not checked the news for today’s pandemic updates. I’m not planning on burying my head in the sand over the situation, but dwelling on a constant 24-hour news-cycle of reports on the pandemic are probably not great for mental health, so I’m going to try and get on with things as normally as possible, dipping into the news only when appropriate.
Today’s previously mundane, but now suddenly “interesting” activity was to go to the local supermarket for some things we needed. I only posted the other day about only going to get provisions once a week, and that seems to have fallen through straight away as my wife was unable to get all the things we needed yesterday. So, this morning, I drove to the local Sainsbury’s to get the things we were missing.
The branch of Sainsburys is attached to a shopping-mall close to where we live and there were plenty of car-parking spaces as most of the other shops in the mall are closed at present. The supermarket has implemented a queueing system that allows twenty people in the store at a time, which requires people to stand in the car-park outside in a zig-zag queue. The parking spaces make handy markers for keeping apart, and the was a gap of three or four metres between each person (or family). Everyone was behaving and, despite it being colder today, seemed in good spirits – chatting with their fellow shoppers and sharing news of what was open, where the treasured items (pasta and toilet rolls) might be acquired, and being generally good-natured. Despite the queue seeming quite long, I got into the store in the third block of people.
Stock on the shelves was pretty plentiful apart than a few items I noticed (pasta and dried rice), and I was able to get the things we needed, plus a few other items that we were running short on.
Canon Sure Shot Supreme & Lomography Color Negative 400.
Maybe the last of the Samsung Fino 60S photos (for now, at least, unless we get housebound for a reeeaaaallly long time!), but I also shot a Canon Sure Shot Supreme on the same outing, so there may be a few more Park Hill photos to come yet.
My local lab tweeted today that they have closed their walk-in reception for the time being due to coronavirus guidance, so I’m going to have to post any rolls to them (and wait for the negs to be posted back) for any stuff I manage to shoot in the meantime. It’s a shame because it will cost more in postage (effectively adding over £5 to the cost of developing for postage both ways) and will take longer than usual, but we all have to get on board with the measures to reduce the spread of the infection, so I don’t mind too much – I’ll probably wait until I have a few rolls before sending them in though to save on the cost.
I’ve also made some semi-serious investigations into home-developing kit. That’ll involve some upfront cost (and the very real risk of me destroying my own photos through incompetence!) if I go ahead with it, but will help with my impatience and wallet-health longer termif I manage to make a sucess of it. I think I’ll sleep on it awhile first…
This is the top / southern end of the Park Hill flats – the entire complex was built according to the topography of the city (which, like Rome, is built on seven hills according to local folklore) so that every floor of the multi-storey building was accessible from ground level without the need for stairs or lifts (although there are plenty of those too).
This end of the complex has not yet been reached by the Urban Splash re-generation project that is renovating and re-purposing the flats and other spaces for modern accomodation and businesses and some of the metal panels protecting the ground-floor flats has been used to host colourful graffiti art.
In other news, I’m expecting that the UK is likely to be placed under a much more stringent lock-down soon because of the COVID-19 pandemic, so it could be that my photography is limited somewhat (although some house-bound projects can be found I’m sure). I’ve enough photos to keep this blog going each day for months and months, so I have no plans to stop posting, but the supply of recently taken photos might be limited.
Maybe this will be a good time to learn how to develop my own film…
S1 Artspace is a gallery nestled within the Park Hill housing complex. The organisation has been in place since 1995, but the gallery at Park Hill is a more recent venue.
Unfortunately, as museums and galleries have now closed in the UK due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s now closed for the time being.
