On the canals at Castlefield

Until May 2011, when I had to go to a meeting in the city, I'd never been to Manchester. I've still spent barely any time there.

With little time to devote to photography while there, I instinctively rode over to the part of the city centre that looked most interesting on the Ordnance Survey map: Castlefield.

With the world's first industrial canal and the world's first passenger railway, the neighbourhood is a tangle of basins and viaducts and narrow cobbled pathways. The Bridgewater Canal arrived here from the Worsley coal field in 1761, and a second branch of the canal reached the Mersey estuary at Runcorn three years later. The opening of the Rochdale Canal through to West Yorkshire in 1804 put Castlefield on a through-route, and the basin was also connected to the nearby River Irwell — later to be turned into the Manchester Ship Canal.

In 1830 the canals were joined by the railways, with the world's first passenger line, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, terminating at Liverpool Road Station (now the Museum of Science and Industry) adjacent to but not crossing the basins. The first two railway viaducts over the water came in 1849 with the Manchester South Junction & Altrincham Railway lines which fork here as they head west from Piccadilly. These lines were in turn crossed by even higher viaducts with 1877's Cheshire Lines into Manchester Central — victims of the Beeching Axe, but reused in the early 1990s for the trams — and the now disused turreted tubular steel Great Northern Railway viaduct of 1894.

Now it's in the half-done regeneration stage, with mixed decayed and preserved industry, warehouse conversions, empty plots and infill apartment blocks.

I think the instincts probably did a reasonable job.

The Settle to Carlisle Railway

I like the ways that railways fit into the landscape: the mix of bold lines, elegant curves, symmetrical structures and lush green earthworks, embedded in big landscapes — like these ones on the Settle to Carlisle Line in the Yorkshire Dales national park — and tying places together.

I've just not quite worked out whether and how to pursue the theme...

On Snowdon

Some shots from Britain's busiest mountain, and the highest in Wales, mostly from an ascent in June 2009.

It's not just that Snowdon is busy with tourists hiking on the several ascent paths. Far more visibly than many of Britain's highlands, it's a very developed and exploited landscape — and not just in terms of the mountain having a railway all the way to the top, where you can take in the view from inside a coffee shop.

The mountainsides around here are strewn with the ruins and remains of industrial workings: quarries and mines, and the railways that took the region's rocks away.

If indeed the mountainsides even still exist: across the Llanberis Pass, the view of Snowdon's neighbour Elidir Fawr is dominated by the 700 acre Dinorwic quarry, closed since 1969 but still an open wound.

Not necessarily a bad thing. From this distance in time, much of the industry and development adds interest to the landscape. And I don't suppose Welsh would have wanted to preserve their Highlands if the only method on offer was that by which the Scottish Highlands escaped development.

View Larger — Ordanance Survey Map