A hill across the Calder valley from Wakefield has been created by landfill, taking waste from across the district and beyond. I’ve seen huge flocks of gulls swirling over it but this afternoon they’re gathering in smaller groups on playing fields around the city and near Westgate Beck, which runs alongside the Dewsbury road into town.
As the sun sets, more gulls are making their way down the valley towards Pugneys country park lake, which has long been a gull roost.
The City and Moor
Distant moors are turning bronze-gold as the sun dips behind them. From Pinderfields, looking back to the city across twelve acres of open fields (now earmarked for residential development) you appreciate how Wakefield, a market town at least since early medieval times, fits into the landscape.
Migrating birds travelling north or south across Yorkshire or from east and west across the Pennines, follow similar routes to the Roman roads, packhorse trails, inland navigation, rail routes and motorways that have played such a part in the development of the town.
A ragged row of trees by a car park on the edge of the city has now turned to full autumn ochre.
Looking for some old slides I came across this Leeds street scene from the early 1970s. It’s the sort of everyday view that it would never normally occur to me to photograph. Martin Salisbury, one of our tutors in graphic design at Leeds Polytechnic, suggested that I should go out and photograph the city to bring a bit of contrast to a project on prehistoric Yorkshire that I was working on.
The streets that I walked through are already part of history and I wish that I’d taken more shots.
When I see archive film of events such as the miners strike of 1974 (there was another ten years later) it’s hard to believe that the environment looked so monochromatic and dismal.
Today television dramas set this period are usually shot in low key colour. My Agfa Gavaert colour slides show that that’s not artistic license; it really was like that.
It’s so long ago that even the minis were half-timbered. In every photograph that I’ve looked at so far, all the vehicles that I can identify are British-made. Those look like Rovers in the background.
And would you believe that there are no parking restrictions so near the centre of the Leeds?!
Richard Knowles of the Rickaro Bookshop in Horbury recently came across these photographs of Victorian Wakefield. They were probably used as business cards by George & John Hall, photographers, who had premises at 26 Westgate.
Someone, presumably George, has dated three of the photographs Saturday, 15 July 1876.
The Butter Cross was built in 1707 and, according to some sources, demolished in 1866/67, but that was ten years before the date on the photograph. Wakefield council still have one of those pillars but I’m not sure where it is kept since the old art gallery, where it was displayed in the garden, closed.
The medieval Chantry Chapel now has a mid-twentieth century facade so these photographs are a valuable record of these buildings but it’s the incidental detail that I particularly like.
The shops by the Butter Cross would be a useful reference if I was illustrating Dickens or painting the Paddington Green backdrop for Oliver!
G & J Hall, photographers, were awarded a medal in the highly successful Wakefield Industrial and Fine Art Exhibition, 1865.
Six Chimneys
The Six Chimneys, an Elizabethan house, stood on Kirkgate, on the site of the present roundabout and pedestrian underpass. It collapsed following structural alterations at 7.45 p.m. on 16 May 1941.
To judge by the shadows, this was taken on the Saturday afternoon. Holden’s (the butchers?) has more or less sold out apart from a flitch of bacon and a single sausage (if that’s what it is!). There doesn’t appear to be any glass in the window, unless Mr Holden had gone to the expense of fitting plate glass.
Bell’s the coopers are displaying an impressive array of baskets and barrels, no doubt all made of locally sourced materials, most of them biodegradable.
Parish Church
The parish church wouldn’t become a cathedral until 1888.
Considering that this is the centre of town at half past eleven on a Saturday morning Wakefield seems uncannily quiet. Where is everybody?
Three boys eyeing the camera and this porter or street-sweeper has stopped to chat to a woman who appears to be carrying a bag.
Street Urchins
Wakefield’s street urchins gathering at the Butter Cross. Was that ladder used by the town’s lamp-lighter?
Handcarts seem to be a common feature around town. It probably wasn’t worth the trouble of loading barrels, baskets and boxes onto a horse drawn cart for delivery around town, so the porter and the delivery boy would have been a familiar sight.
I remember local author Stan Barstow telling me that one of his first jobs was to take a handcart as far as Lupset on the Saturday morning delivery round for one of the Horbury butchers. From a later period, I remember a big black butcher’s bicycle with a large rectangular basket between the handlebars, parked outside one of the High Street butchers in Horbury.
Wakefield Words
Finally, here are a couple of Saturday morning strollers, stopping for a chat on the Chantry Bridge.
As we’re looking down on them, this must have been taken from the Kings Mill.
What were they chatting about? Wakefield is lucky in that one of my predecessors William Banks who, like me, wrote a book of walks around Wakefield, took the trouble to make a note of the town’s dialect and phrases.
So they could well have been saying;
‘Hah goes it? Owt fresh?’
‘Naah, nowt; what’s t’best news wi’ thee?’
So, if you’d like to know a little about the words these street folk of old Wakefield used for weather, food, childhood and schooldays, the countryside, proverbs and a few supernatural tales, you can order a copy of my book Wakefield Words from my www.willowisland.co.uk website.
If they ever invent a time machine and you get whisked back to Victorian Wakefield, it might make a useful phrase book! I was fascinated by William Banks collection of words and phrases and, as you’ll see from the book, I had fun adding cartoon illustrations to bring them to life. I’d always wanted to do a real little paperback book and I’m really pleased with this one. It’s quite jolly and I love the smell of a fresh paperback. Mmm! – you don’t get that with a digital version, do you?
My thanks to Dave Russ, who tells me that William Stott Banks’ book was exhibited at the 1865 Wakefield Industrial and Fine Art Exhibition (Section XI, Stationary, Printing, Bookbinding, Penmanship). It won a second class certificate, with a judges comment of “A work of local interest, well arranged”.
More of my publications can be found at Willow Island Editions or, if you happen to be in Horbury, you can find the full range of titles at the Rickaro Bookshop.
My thanks to Richard Knowles of Rickaro for the loan of these evocative photographs.
IT’S RARE for me to have a whole hour free so to make the most of it, while I wait for Barbara to finish work, I draw the bookshop, starting with the door frame and working across the double-page spread, running out of ink halfway and borrowing a pen from Barbara to finish.
With any complicated subject I have to establish an anchor point before I can start mapping everything in its place. Those long verticals of the door frame that I started with on the left weren’t much help and it was only when I established the leaded window above the door that I was able to get a grip on proportions. The 45° pattern made a useful grid.
You can see where this went slightly wrong as the window started going into perspective on the right, my drawing equivalent to the distortions you’d get if you were photographing the scene with a wide-angle lens.
THIS SKETCHBOOK drawing was made from the life drawing studio in Batley School of Art, probably in the winter months of 1968, looking down on Batley swimming baths. I came across it this morning when I was looking through some of my teenage holiday journals in the attic.
The box on the windowsill is one that we were set to design and make in the college workshop. In it I can identify a pen knife, pen holder, compass and ruling pen, the tools of my trade as a foundation student, and beside it are bottles of blue, yellow and green Indian ink.
The yellow box on the left contains children’s wax crayons; ‘Noddy’ crayons, branded with the name of the Enid Blyton character.
Rubbing these crayons on my sketchbook page laid the foundations for a kind of poor man’s scraperboard which I then, with difficulty, painted over with India ink which I could then scrape through to produce highlights such as mouldings, mortar and leaded windows.
This is a long and laborious way to produce a drawing but it’s evident that I enjoyed building up the textures.
It’s successful in bringing back to me the drabness of Batley at that time when smokeless zones were a recent innovation. I love the dour stonework and the glowering skylights which you can’t imagine would ever allow fresh air and sunlight filter down into the changing rooms below.
Wall Rue, Asplenium ruta-muraria grows alongside the Rusty-back Fern in the crevices of an old wall in Ossett. It is a common fern of walls and limestone crevices.
Leathery leaves and long wiry roots are useful adaptations for conserving water.
Like the Rusty-back it is a member of the Spleenwort family, used as a herbal remedy for diseases of the spleen and also in the treatment of rickets.
The Rusty-back fern, Ceterach officinarum, has rusty scales on the backs of its leaves. These cover the spore-producing sori and probably help prevent the fern from drying out. During dry spells the fronds roll in at the edges.
Growing to just few inches, this fern is found in dry crevices in limestone and in old mortared walls. A small colony grows on a north-east facing sandstone wall on Station Road, Ossett.
It is best grown in a cold frame, potted rather high, among loam mixed with a large proportion of brick-rubbish, and not over-watered.
Thomas More, British Ferns, 1861
Rusty-back or Scale fern, drawn by W.W. Coleman, British Ferns, 1861.
Rusty-back fern is a member of the spleenwort family and was used to treat diseases of the spleen. Legend has it that Cretan sheep with spleen disorders would greedily devour its rootstock.
It’s scientific name Ceterach is said to derive from the Arabic ‘Cheterak’ the name that Eastern physicians used for this plant.
I HAVE A HABIT of editing out the buses, vans and cars as I draw and I realise that for Horbury High Street I’m giving the wrong impression so, as I draw the Beauty Spa (originally a butcher’s shop) on the right, I add whatever figures happen to be passing at the time. The lad standing with his scooter adds a useful spot of contrast with his red T-shirt.
This is the view from Horbury’s newest café, the Caffé Capri, which the only one where you can sit out watching the world go by. It might just be Horbury on our weekly date with my mum’s shopping but in this weather it feels like being on holiday. Especially when accompanied by a small potato tortilla and a glass of chilled pinot grigio.
THIS IS the kind of building that I find myself drawing when I doodle; a series of triangles, semi-circles and rectangles. I like those interlocking roofs. The tower has a compact sturdiness, like a pepper-pot or a chess-piece.
The clump of ash saplings and one or two shoots of bramble (top), growing in a courtyard amongst buildings is the kind of subject that Frederick Franck often drew in his Zen of Seeing books. Unlike the building, you can’t simplify this tangle of vegetation into geometric shapes, you’ve just got to let yourself go and hope that the rhythms that run through the clump will appear in your drawing.
A man-made object such as a fence-post or old wall would give some definition and contrast but all that I had available was the grid of the paving slabs.
WHEN WE saw the flashing warnings for a queues ahead we thought that it was just the normal morning rush but unfortunately there had been an accident involving seven cars on the approach to junction 35 (the Rotherham junction of the M1, heading south). As we waited, drivers were strolling about chatting to each other while police cars, fire engines and ambulances hurtled along the hard shoulder to reach the scene.
My way of dealing with an unspecified period of waiting would normally be to draw anything from the natural world, a way of escaping from the situation, but although there is a belt of woodland along this stretch of the motorway I felt the need to keep looking ahead, just in case the traffic started moving again, which it did after an hour and half, giving me plenty of time to draw what I find a difficult subject, the cars ahead.
A hill across the Calder valley from Wakefield has been created by landfill, taking waste from across the district and beyond. I’ve seen huge flocks of gulls swirling over it but this afternoon they’re gathering in smaller groups on playing fields around the city and near Westgate Beck, which runs alongside the Dewsbury road into town.
Distant moors are turning bronze-gold as the sun dips behind them. From Pinderfields, looking back to the city across twelve acres of open fields (now earmarked for residential development) you appreciate how Wakefield, a market town at least since early medieval times, fits into the landscape.
Migrating birds travelling north or south across Yorkshire or from east and west across the Pennines, follow similar routes to the Roman roads, packhorse trails, inland navigation, rail routes and motorways that have played such a part in the development of the town.
