Isle of Man - Douglas Head

Overlooking the town of Douglas is the Great Union Camera Obscura. Built as a tourist attraction in 1892, this is the only camera obscura in the world with eleven apertures. A metal tube is rotated between each of these, and the captured light mirrored down and through a series of lenses onto a circular and concave white tabletop, to produce a properly-oriented changing view of the immediate locale.

Clearly visible is the Douglas Head Lighthouse, built in 1857 by David and Thomas Stevenson, and rebuilt in 1892. The tower is 66 feet tall, and provides a light at an elevation of 105 feet. The light, one of five on the island, was automated in 1986.

Isle of Man - Point of Ayre

Point of Ayre marks the northernmost point of the Isle of Man. There are three marine warning systems here. The Point of Ayre (High) lighthouse, at an elevation of 105 feet, is the oldest on the island. Built by Robert Stevenson, of the famous family of lighthouse builders, the light (in background below) operated from 1818.

The accretion of shifting shingle - the Norse Eyrr means a gravel bank - necessitated the construction in 1888 of a second light, Point of Ayre (Low), 30 feet tall and known as The Winkie, 250 yards to seaward of the main light. The Winkie (top photograph) had to be moved a further 80 yards to seaward in 1951, but ceased operation in 2010.

The main lighthouse was automated in 1993, since when the lighthouse-keeper's house has been in private ownership. The fog signal, the twelve feet-long horns of which were supplied by Sentinel air compressors driven by Kelvin diesel engines, was taken out of service in 2005.

Isle of Man - Snaefell Mountain Railway

The Snaefell Mountain Railway climbs from Laxey to the Isle of Man's highest point (2,034 feet) over a distance of five miles. The electrified railway, built in a single season in 1895, is of 3 ft 6 in gauge, and employs bow collectors to pick up 550 volts DC from catenary wires, the most exposed of which are removed in winter to prevent damage through icing.

There are six wood-bodied railcars, all built by George F. Milnes & Co. in 1895 (although No. 5 was rebuilt in 1971). These can also be used on the Manx Electric Railway (the "low road"), which runs between Douglas and Ramsey, on track of 3 ft gauge, crossing that of the Mountain Railway at Laxey, by virtue of a change of bogies.

Isle of Man - Laxey Wheel

Known also as the Lady Isabella (after the wife of the island's then governor), the Laxey Wheel is the largest operational waterwheel in the world. It was designed by Robert Casement and built in 1854 to pump water from part of the Great Laxey Mine.

The overshot wheel, six feet broad, and a stunning 72 feet and six inches in diameter, is still, as designed, driven by water syphoned to the top of the structure in concealed pipework. The wheel turns, in 'reverse', at about three rpm, and drives a crank with a throw of four feet. This is connected to a counterweight and a wooden rod, 600 feet long, which runs on iron wheels seated upon short lengths of flat ironwork affixed to the top of a stone 'viaduct'.

The wheeled rod moves back and forth about eight feet, its movement transferred, via T-rockers, to vertical pump rods that descend 1,500 down the mine shaft. Although the wheel no longer pumps water, it originally moved 250 gallons per minute, and was capable of managing significantly greater volumes. Great Laxey Mine closed in 1929.

Isle of Man - Peel Harbour

Peel is the third largest town on the Isle of Man, but known as the isle's sole 'city' - as only Peel has a cathedral. The town is the island's main fishing port, and shellfish processing and kipper curing continue as viable trades.

Accordingly, Peel has a substantial harbour. The inner harbour, pictured, is tidal, but a gate was added in 2005 as part of the development of Peel Marina. There are five marine lights around the town, that on Peel Castle Jetty marking the west side of the entrance to the inner harbour.

K6 Restoration

Concrete knocked out of K6 telephone kiosk base; handle, glazing frames, Pull/Push sign, glass, Telephone signs, shelves, poster frames and backboard removed; door closer detached; bare shell media blasted.

































Cracks in cast iron repaired; unnecessary bolt holes in back filled; shell primed, undercoated and sprayed in Post Office red, inside and out. Ceiling hand painted with primer, undercoat and three coats of gloss white.

Back and roof top-coated in red, by hand. Telephone signs stripped of putty and silicone, and reinstated using clear mould-proof silicone.

Kiosk lifted onto scaffold poles using levers and car jack, and rolled into place. Time capsule placed in base; base half-filled with hardcore and near-filled with ready-made concrete; base finished with sand and cement screed.

Box fitted with earth strap, connected to ground, and cabled for lighting and telephone. Externally-switched power cable carried through 'hockey stick' pipe and ceiling channel; fluorescent light cleaned, rewired and installed; hockey stick painted in.

Two sides and opening front top-coated by hand in red, inside and out. 72 panes of glass stripped of paint, putty and silicone, scrubbed, and run through dishwasher. 72 glazing frames cleaned and hand-painted in red.

Backboard washed, cleaned with industrial thinners, sanded with fine wet-and-dry paper, polished with black T-Cut, and refitted, with cabling ducted behind.

Glass and Pull/Push sign reinstated, using clear mould-proof silicone; glazing frames reinstated; new brass glazing pins inserted, with crimping tool used to affix washers.

Shelves and poster frames cleaned and sanded, twice sprayed in black, and affixed to backboard, positioned to cover as many old holes as possible. Handle re-affixed; door closer re-attached; plinth painted with two coats of black.

GPO 706 telephone connected to ring when house telephone rings. Appropriate posters printed on photographic paper and inserted. (Note: Public Telephone sign was of the National Telephone Company, 1881 to 1911, incorporated into the General Post Office when telephony was largely nationalised in 1912.)

The Road to Wigan Pier

There is no pier in land-locked Wigan. At the heart of what was once mining country, Wigan was renowned for its industrial ugliness. The town's coal-loading staithe, upon the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, where tubs of coal were unloaded into barges, was known jocularly as Wigan Pier. 

The jetty is understood to have been demolished in 1929, before George Orwell's arrival, but the ironic name had already caught on. A reconstructed tippler (top) demonstrates how the coal tubs were emptied straight into the waiting barges. On the opposite side of the canal stands Gibson's cotton warehouse, built in 1777, and converted in 1984 into The Orwell pub.

Facing this across the canal is Trencherfield Mill, a cotton spinning mill, built with an iron and steel frame in 1907 for William Woods & Sons Ltd, the second mill on the site. This became part of Courtaulds in 1964.

The Grade II-listed building has been converted into offices and apartments, largely empty, but such that many architectural details have been preserved (above).

Wigan Dry Dock is believed to date from c.1888, constructed as part of the adjacent boatyard, and still in use. The canopy is likely of the mid-twentieth century.

Close to Wigan Pier, alongside the River Douglas, are Eckersley's Western Mills. There are three mills here, designed by A.H. Stott for Farington, Eckersley & Co., and built between 1884 and 1900. Eckersley was at the time the largest ring spinner in Britain.

Much of the complex of spinning blocks, engine houses and their chimneys, winding rooms, weaving sheds and warehouses is derelict, although home to a roller rink and kart circuit.

ShACC Attack

As one might expect, there were a number of uncommon vehicles on show at the Whittington Castle open evening of the Shropshire Alternative Car Club (ShACC), which majors on kit and one-off vehicles. The Lomax kit car, based on Citroën 2CV mechanicals, was created in 1982. Its current incarnation is made by Cradley Motor Works, of St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex.

KBC 122K is a 1972 Porsche 914. Built in collaboration with Volkswagen between 1969 and 1976, the 914 boasted a 1.7 litre flat four in its VW guise, and a two litre flat six in its Porsche guise. In the United States, other than California, both were sold badged as Porsches.

TDG 602 is an Austin Nash Metropolitan. Nash was an American manufacturer, but determined that tooling costs would be too high to build the Metropolitan in the States. The car was thus built in Europe, although initially sold only in North America. UK-based manufacture was undertaken by Fisher & Ludlow (bodywork) and Austin (mechanicals and assembly).

Strand / Aldwych Underground Station

Aldwych underground station was closed to passengers in 1994, but it had never been used to its intended extent. At the end of a spur from Holborn, off the Piccadilly line, the station was built upon the site of the Royal Strand Theatre, and opened on 30 November 1907.

The Piccadilly line was one of three completed in 1906/7 by the Underground Electric Railways Company, a creation of American entrepreneur Charles Tyson Yerkes, who had built rail and tram lines in Chicago. The station was opened as Strand, but the name was changed to Aldwych on 1 May 1915 to avoid confusion with Charing Cross Strand, which in that year was renamed Strand - the latter reverted to Charing Cross in 1979.

The architect was Leslie Green, all of whose underground stations boast facades of deep red glazed brick and terracotta, from the Leeds Fireclay Company. The entrances, one on the Strand (top), and another on Surrey Street (second photo), initially bore the legend Piccadilly Tube, but this was changed to Piccadilly R[ail]l[wa]y.

All of Green's stations are constructed using a load-bearing steel frame, a Chicagoan innovation that provides strength enough for lift-winding equipment. Aldwych was a deep station, the platforms over 92 feet below street level, and three lift shafts were sunk, anticipating extensions never realised (third photo).

Being so close to both Temple and Embankment stations, Aldwych was never busy, and only one of the shafts was ever fitted out, with a pair of inter-linked lifts (fourth photo), operated by a dedicated liftman.

Anticipating low usage, and for reasons of economy, only the intended exit set of stairs and passages was completed, experimentally painted at ground level with fluorescent paint subsequent to the King's Cross fire (fifth photo). The intended entrance set was never used and was left unfinished (above).

There were two tunnels to the station, which boasted two platforms, but the eastern tunnel (above) was not used after 1914, with just a two-car shuttle run to and from Holborn in the western tunnel.

The station was shut on Sundays from April 1917, and in 1922 the booking office was closed, with tickets instead sold in the lifts. Access these days is solely via 192 steps. At the bottom of those to the eastern platform can be seen various tiling schemes (below), as the station was used as a test bed.

The western platform, complete with tube train, is used for filming purposes - the posters here are reproductions - and as a training facility by the emergency services: the line to Holborn is still usable.

The original station name can be seen on the disused eastern platform (remainder of photos), used during WWI for the safe storage of over 300 paintings from the National Gallery. The track is the original, on wooden sleepers, built to the pattern used before the introduction of the suicide pit. The posters are from the 1970s, testament to the quality of the adhesives tested here.

The eastern platform and tunnel were used during WWII to store items from the V&A and the British Museum, including the Elgin Marbles, and were full by March 1940. It wasn't until September that year that the service to Aldwych was suspended and the western platform and tunnel provided as an air raid shelter, opened in October.

The Aldwych shuttle service started up again in July 1946, but was not much used. From June 1958 the service was reduced to one at rush hours only. The death knell came in 1994 when the lifts required replacement. As by that point only 450 people per day were using the station, Aldwych closed on 30 September 1994.

Clifton Suspension Bridge - 150 Years

Although one of Brunel's masterpieces, the Clifton Suspension Bridge was neither completed during his lifetime, nor to his design. Commenced in 1831, the structure at Clifton was of the very first generation of wrought iron chain suspension bridges, absolutely at the cutting edge of the engineering of the time. Built at Clifton to take advantage of the relatively narrow width of the Avon Gorge at that point, the deck is 245 feet above high water.

A first design competition was conducted in 1829, three years after Thomas Telford had built his suspension bridge over the Menai Straits. The competition committee asked for Telford's expert opinion on the entries, which included four by Brunel. Telford declared all the designs flawed, and was asked by the committee to submit his own scheme. His short-span suspension bridge was responded to with a new, cheaper, design from Brunel.

Accordingly, a second competition was held in 1830. Smith and Hawkes' scheme was selected as the winner, and Brunel's abutment-based design placed second. Brunel, aged just 24, managed to reverse these placings after private meetings with the committee's expert advisers, and work commenced in June 1831. Four months later a shortage of funds, and riots in Bristol, brought progress to a halt. Work did not re-commence until August 1836, starting with the abutment on the Leigh Woods side. That on the Clifton side, left of picture at top, was commenced in 1839.

The abutments, of grey Pennant rubble stone faced with dressed Old Red Sandstone, are of different heights, to account for the taller and steeper cliff on the Clifton side. They were thought solid until found, in 2002, to be formed of a series of massive chambers. By 1840 the towers, 702 feet apart, 86 feet high, and of about 4,000 tons each, were complete. Next came the anchorages, inclined tunnels cut 60 feet into the cliffs, into the depths of which are carried the ends of the chains. These are locked behind cast iron anchor plates, of 30 square feet, bolted to the rock, and reinforced by 10 feet of Blue Staffordshire brickwork. These were completed in 1842, in which year the towers were topped with cranes to enable construction of the chains.

The chain links, the shortest 24 feet long, had largely been delivered when funds again dwindled. By 1848 the Copperhouse Foundry, Hayle, Cornwall, that had made the links, issued proceedings for payment of its invoices. The debt was repaid only through sale of the chain links, which ended up on the Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash, also by Brunel. The Clifton project came to a second halt in 1853.

Brunel died in 1859. The following year John Hawkshaw designed the Charing Cross railway bridge. This replaced Hungerford Suspension Bridge, another Brunel construction, and Hawkshaw and fellow engineer William Barlow proposed that the Hungerford ironwork be used at Clifton, the links being of the same design as those sold for the bridge at Saltash.

Hawkshaw and Barlow made some design changes - longitudinal deck girders instead of timber trussing, a third chain, and new anchorages - and work re-commenced in November 1862. The Hungerford saddles were installed atop the towers in 1863, and eight wrought iron cables were strung across the void, to provide temporary falsework. The chains, of 4,200 links, were in place by May 1864.

The deck is attached to the chains by way of iron rods, which are in turn bolted to the bottom, middle and top chain, to ease replacement. Once the longitudinal girders were craned into place, the cross bracing was undertaken. The deck itself was formed of five inch thick Baltic pine, laid in two layers, at right angles to each other. The bridge finally opened on 8 December 1864.

The roadway was first asphalted in 1897, and the anchorages strengthened in 1925 (Leigh Woods) and 1939 (Clifton), but, in the main, the structure is just as it was 150 years ago. No steel cables have been added, as has proven necessary with some other early suspension bridges. Brunel didn't see the completed bridge, but he would have known that it was, and is, an engineering marvel.