General Chat

I didn't ever go up north until I was twenty and just caught it looking like it had been through an industrial revolution.

One powerful memory is the smell of sulphur which started at Bedford, coming from the Stewartby Brickworks I believe, and hung in the air all the way to Leeds where I was delivering.

The next time I went, no more than eight years later, the air was clean and all the blackened buildings were back to their pristine sandstone.

I was thinking, when we went to Wales this week, that I had not ever seen the valleys when they were industrial. I first went to Wales about twenty years ago when there were only a couple of mines left so I missed the winding gear and spoil heaps.

It would have been good to see the contrast.

Maybe because the media seem apt at showing the footage from the days of the industrial north

I live in South Yorkshire, I have a buzzing cosmopolitan city a walk away and the Peaks a 5 minute drive away

Gods County :-)

But, some time in the seventies, the grime of the industrial revolution was removed from the buildings and it's underlying beauty was revealed.

I was lucky enough to see the before and after in Northern England but not in South Wales.

Bedford is not in the north of England !!!

That's right.

Did you think it was?

Somewhere is north of Bedford!

I'm just south of Bedford :-D :-D :-D. And Stewartby Brickworks still looks the same

Is it still working?

Part of it is I believe, There are not many brickworks still in production around here now. My nearest one was Arlesey where they made the famous white clay bricks but that went long ago.

Edit.. Stewartby is now redundant OH thinks they ceased production about 2009, but the buildings and chimneys are still in evidence

I think they must have a different way of heating the brick ovens because the sulphurous smell is certainly not there now.

Well,it wouldn't be would it? Coal is not as readily available as it was.

I detest the smell of Sulphur. It does tend to hang in the air doesn't it.

I expect it was just one of those smells you didn't notice if it was there all the time.

The first time I went north and noticed it I had come from an all pervading smell of pig s*it and people used to pump their cesspits out at night, into ditches.

:-D :-D :-D :-D. Sharron, one of the pleasures of living in the countryside where I do now. Didn't have the problem before 1969 when I moved up country from North London. Lots of different smells there and some of those were not very pleasant. ;-) :-D :-D

My greatest memory of the hot summer of 1976 is of the smell of pig s*it.

Sharron have you visited Big Pit?

We have a large field of cows just a few yards down the road and when it is warm and the wind is in the right direction it don't half pen and ink :-D :-D :-D :-D

Oh no indeed! I haven't been to Big Pit.

I put a whole new depth of feeling into claustrophobic.

I love the valleys and feel the need to visit them from time to time,they are very special.
In fact, I didn't like the welsh much until I went there and that was because all of the welsh who moved into the village with the LSA were so damned miserable.Fred always said I would like them when I was in Wales.

Once I had seen the Rhondda (?) I could absolutely understand why. It must have been so hard to leave.

I just would have liked to have experienced those valleys before they were so radically changed.

Once a year there is a dairy farm/ice-cream manufacturer in the village who
spreads the content of his slurry pit on to his fields and slurry is even ore delicious than the fresh stuff.

Sharron you can look around without going down the mine! It's not that far from Ebbw,; you should stop for a while on your next trip

I left the UK in 1967, Lancashire was full of black buildings, grimy and awful.

Over the next few years, there was a great cleaning of them, my brother kept me updated about what was happening in Manchester and surrounding area. It was still a huge surprise when we went back in 1973 and actually saw the real original colour of those majestic buildings.

Unfortunately, I understand that some of the cleaning agents used back then were not good for the sandstone of the buildings and there was quite a lot of damage done in the early days.

I come from cotton mill country .......... and well remember cotton fluff blowing around, and the mill girls with their hair in curlers under headscarves to try to keep their hair clean ready for their date in the evening.

That was the other big surprise throughout the 70s and 80s ........... first of all the cleaning of the outside of some of those cotton mills and how truly majestic they were, and then the gradual development of empty mills into flats and condos for sale.


I did see a little bit of the valleys in Wales, and the collieries still working.

And I was in Liverpool for 5 years during the latter part of its heyday as a seaport, and the start of the Beatles.

I tried to goin adrift mine at Beamish once and that was pretty shameful.

Don't think I am ready for a look round Big Pit yet. I am still kind of soaking up the valleys.

Thinking back, I always saw the valleys in black and white in my minds eye and the vision always felt depressing.I think it was from seeing the television reports at the time of the Aberfan disaster. We did go there once because I wanted to see the sun shining there!