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Blackened Buildings of Manchester Before the Clean Air Act
- adrianN 8y agoThis site makes me click a hundred times to opt out of cookies. No thanks.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- simias 8y agoI was surprised by that as well, especially since it's in the UK. Surely that can't be GPDR compliant.
- village-idiot 8y agoI think the UKs relationship with EU regulations at this point is .... complicated.
- zython 8y agoyou can just click to deny all the categories and everything in the "partners" tab disappears.
- mrob 8y ago"Fanboy's Annoyance List" in uBlock takes care of it.
- emmelaich 8y agoI'd very much like to know when the blackened buildings were photo'd. Something more precise than "before the 60s" Also (2015)
- nizmow 8y agoJudging by the cars I'd say mid- to late-60s. I can see both Mk 1 and Mk 2 Ford Cortinas in several shots.
- DanBC 8y agoIn image 4 there's a car with the licence plate "LYE897D". D plates are from 1966, so after that. In the first image there's a building being constructed next to Manchester Art Gallery, so I'll try to find out when that went up. EDIT eh, it's 75 Mosley Street but I have no idea when it was built.
- handelaar 8y agoThe photos do appear to be mid-late 60s from the cars you can see. But I'll observe that the Uni of Manchester buildings photos could have been from 1987 or 1990 -- being when I saw them myself, still near-black on the Oxford Road side.
- sjclemmy 8y agoThe picture of Spring Gardens looks 1970s judging from the fashion. At least 1969 from the number plate - ‘H’ reg. I was initially going to say 1970 - but apparently 1967 saw both E and F registered cars. I never knew that.
- mirimir 8y agoThe site says "soot". But I wonder if these are limestone or marble faced, and it's mainly from SOx pollution.
- toyg 8y agoLook up the paintings from Lowry. He lived most of his life right here. Industrial England lived under a black sky, from all the coal being burnt.
- mirimir 8y agoThanks. I'd forgotten how bad it was, with the coal soot. Soft coal, too, I guess. But there is still the issue that SOx erodes CaCO3 stone, and facilitates soot buildup. So you get this black foamy crust.
- Steve44 8y agoThe site https://ourworldindata.org/london-air-pollution https://ourworldindata.org/london-air-pollution has a chart part way down showing the suspended particulate matter (SPM) in London's air from 1700 to 2016 - basically soot. It peaked in about 1890 when GB was using about 160 million tonnes per year.
- JeanMarcS 8y agoI remember in 1997 in Toulouse/France, they cleaned a lot of building before hosting some games of the 1998 FIFA World Cup. It was a shock to realize how dirty they were before that !
- crc32 8y agoA good example of government regulation improving quality of life!
- blockedTwitter 8y agoWell, it would have happened sooner and more efficiently if the invisible hand of the market were only permitted to operate freely.
- mcguire 8y agoSee! It is possible to identify sarcasm in pure text.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- falsedan 8y agoThis is just cleaning the facades! Edinburgh prohibits this kind of cosmetic work in ordr to keep the historical character of buildings (tho sandstone doesn't go as black as limestone).
- arethuza 8y agoAre you sure - most buildings in central Edinburgh seem to have been cleaned in the last couple of decades?
- stevekemp 8y agoI remember the cleaning of the Scott Monument was a very contentious issue - which was eventually abandoned. Nowadays you can see the contrast between the old/dirty stone and the new pieces used for restoration.
- arethuza 8y agoI'm actually sitting in an office in George Street looking out of my window at a stone wall where I can see that the entire one building has been cleaned and the next door one hasn't! :-) The National Galleries near the Mound was cleaned entirely a few years back - it's actually starting to collect dark marks on it again.
- simias 8y agoWhile I'm sure my lungs are very thankful for the regulation I really dig the ominous look of the blackened buildings. Reminds me of the Cologue cathedral: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Gothic-Cologne-Cathedral-004.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Gothic-C...
- toyg 8y agoBelieve me, they’re much better clean. The limestone ones, when the sun shines “just so”, seem to be made of gold - which is probably on purpose, considering when they were built Manchester was the centre of the world, richer than London or most other places on Earth.
- willyt 8y agoBetter architects of the period understood the effects of soot and played to them. Because houses were heated with coal it was a problem even before the industrial revolution. As such, some architectural historians believe that buildings shouldn’t be cleaned for that reason.
- Symbiote 8y agoThey are slowly cleaning Cologne Cathedral. Try the Hold Saviour Church in Gyumri, Armenia, which is built from black and orange stone. It's close to the Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God, also black. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holy_Saviour_Church_Gyumri.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holy_Saviour_Church_... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2014_Prowincja_Szirak,_Giumri,_Katedra_Matki_Bo%C5%BCej_(02).jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2014_Prowincja_Szira...
- Engineering-MD 8y agoAs do I. I always like old industrial cities in the north of the UK for the unusual character they have due to the black buildings. I’m sure some buildings look better cleaned, but I hope they don’t get carried away and remove the unique character of these cities.
- singularity2001 8y agoMeta: instead of accepting cookies click at 'manage' and be in awe.
- yipbub 8y agoMaking GDPR rights cumbersome to claim.
- NullPrefix 8y agoCheckmarks are ticked by default, so it looks like opt out, not opt in.
- mattlondon 8y agoWhich I believe flies in the face of the recommendations. I am not an expert on this but I think that all consent should be deliberate and informed, and not "automatic - opps I just clicked through and automatically signed up because I didn't read to the end."
- kapep 8y agoIt's a shady tactic to just get you to accept cookies. If the tracking is not active until you actually click accept though, I think it should technically still count as opt-in? I mean they make you jump through hoops if you want no tracking and get rid of the cookie banner - but you could also just ignore it for the same effect, as the banner does not limit the use of the site (unlike banners of others websites that block the whole content until you take action).
- Joeri 8y agoWhich is in violation of GDPR, so very odd they go through all the effort to almost be compliant without actually getting the benefit of compliance.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 8y agoThis way, they get people to think that GDPR has little effect and is mostly a burden.
- lostlogin 8y agoPossibly related - London’s Great Fog of 1952 was a big catalyst for change, with 4000-12,000 dying in a few days due to health problems from the fog. It was pretty grim. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London
- singularity2001 8y agoClean Air Act combined with some wall cleaning acts, beautiful.
- jordn 8y agoWere these buildings then cleaned, or do the buildings "recover" through natural processes (rain etc)?
- toyg 8y agoI can’t believe the Manchester Evening News is on HN. I bet they’ve pillaged these pics from Manchester Revisited (FB group). As I said in another comment, look up the Lowry paintings to get an idea of how bad the air was in industrial England. He lived in Salford, right beside Manchester. Most of Manchester city centre is old warehouses and offices, the city was basically a giant coal-powered factory and distribution centre. The St. Anne church in central Stockport (again near Manchester) didn’t get the cleaning treatment until the 2010s, I honestly believed it was just built black. Imperial Britain was basically like today’s China: bustling, polluted, exploiting the poor and vulnerable (child labor etc etc), with no care whatsoever for consequences as long as someone was getting rich.
- fnord123 8y ago>He lived in Salford, right beside Manchester. Salford is literally "Dirty Old Town" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wj7xZf8xm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wj7xZf8xm8
- jwdunne 8y agoI agree! I only ever see the MEN in my FB news feed. Even funnier: I can see the Lowry from where I'm sat! Salford is similar. I live in Eccles and there's a few old buildings. One is the Bridgewater mill. It's a big dirty building that's been converted into a business unit. I remember I used to go to a gym in there. Salford is apparently the most poluted area in the UK today. There's no smog but as you move further out towards Cheshire / Warrington, like Irlam and Cadishead, it's a world apart.
- delibes 8y agoEven stranger to see Eccles and Irlam mentioned by someone here - I grew up in those two places! You mean the Bridgewater Mill by Patricroft bridge, right? If you're interested in Victorian era tech, there's also a Nasmyth steam hammer a little bit up Worsley Road. https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/steam-hammer-refit-salford-thor-9472716 https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manches...
- mattlondon 8y agoA huge difference. Imagine what it will look like when we ban diesel from urban & suburban areas!
- Joeri 8y agoOr what it looks like when you get rid of the cars themselves from inner cities. I got rid of my car over a decade ago and after a few years really started noticing just how much of a burden cars are on city life and how much of an eye sore. Amusingly you get a bit of an impression of what it could be by looking at the present day pictures from the article, because they’re google street view pictures and google tries to remove most of the cars. Realistic present day pictures would have the cars bumper to bumper on most of the roads. (Getting rid of all cars is probably not possible, but 90+% of them aren’t necessary, could be parked at the city’s edge and I’m pretty sure most city residents would agree after a year or two it is better that way.)
- KozmoNau7 8y agoI sold my car earlier this year, and started bicycle commuting again about a month ago. I honestly hadn't realized just how wasteful of space car traffic is. When I commuted by public transit, It was mostly not directly visible to me, especially when I took the train and just bypassed all the traffic. But riding my bike, I see just how clogged up the roads get, and just how much the flow gets disturbed by people blocking intersections and creating gridlock. The vast majority of these cars are only transporting a single occupant, even the huge 7-seat SUVs. The amount of wasted space is simply astounding. If we could keep even just the city centers free of cars, there would be so much more space available for pedestrians and cyclists and city life. Sure, allow some commercial traffic, such as deliveries, tradesmen with jobs to do in the city, buses and taxi services. Ban all private car traffic, and only hand out temporary permits for transporting home bulky objects or similar short-term undertakings. Price it so that people won't just buy one every single day. Maybe set a limit on how many permits are allowed per month, to prevent the wealthy from gaming the system. Quality of life would increase massively.
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- Reason077 8y ago10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister’s official residence, famously has black-painted bricks in order to mimick the effects of coal smog. Apparently, when cleaned in the 1960s to reveal it’s yellow London bricks, it just didn’t look right! http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-10-downing-street-door-is-black-2015-12 http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-10-downing-street-door-is-...
- Shivetya 8y agopassenger ships used to have black hulls from the coal loading ports on down to mask the markings.
- nautilus12 8y agoWhy is it that the lightest part of the Spring Gardens before cleaning happen to be the darkest parts after cleaning?
- nsxwolf 8y agoNow I'm wondering how many modern movies about pre-1960s London get this historical detail right.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- handelaar 8y agoMost UK cities looked like this for the entire portion of my life I wasn't allowed to vote yet. I grew up in London (and slightly in Edinburgh area) and the centres of Edinburgh and Glasgow were pitch black all over right into the late 1980s when the sandwashing began. This photo of London St Pancras station, for example, looks like it is colour-drained, but that's really how it looked until they washed the building in the 90s. https://farm2.static.flickr.com/1818/43873591751_154164f8d5_b.jpg https://farm2.static.flickr.com/1818/43873591751_154164f8d5_... That sign was inlined with slightly-feeble red neon, and that will remain my mental image of how this station looks even though obviously it's been utterly transformed since: https://blackcablondon.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/st-pancras-front.jpg https://blackcablondon.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/st-pancra...
- noer 8y agoI grew up in Pittsburgh. During my childhood I remember a lot of black stone buildings. I always assumed there was some kind of dark colored stone that was used to build buildings & churches. It wasn't until I was 12 or so that these buildings started getting cleaned that I realized they were all soot stained.
- Isamu 8y agoHere's a pic showing the soot being cleaned from Carnegie Library - pretty black indeed. I kinda remember those days. https://www.reddit.com/r/powerwashingporn/comments/6ev3pe/carnegie_library_being_sand_blasted_in_1990/ https://www.reddit.com/r/powerwashingporn/comments/6ev3pe/ca... They say "sand blasted" but I'm pretty sure they used gentler methods.
- milesokeefe 8y agoSome power washers integrate sand into the water stream. So sandblasted, but by a high pressure jet of water carrying sand instead of air blasted sand.
- bobbiechen 8y agoIt's pretty stark to see the difference between the cleaned and dirty buildings. There are sections of the Mellon Institute columns [1] which are uncleaned as a reminder of how bad they used to be. [1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mellon-institute-columns https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mellon-institute-columns
- 0x7f800000 8y agoProof at last! I always felt that the chimney sweeps seemed way too happy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I-b_GJ4ltk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I-b_GJ4ltk
- danans 8y agoWas in Sheffield recently, not far from Manchester. The town hall still appears to have the sooty facade. In the context of all the new stuff surrounding it, the sooty building kind of looks nice. Maybe it's worth keeping some of these in their sooty state as a reminder (and warning) of how horrible the air once was?
- gcb0 8y agohttps://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-region/cost-v-benefit-clearing-the-air https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-region/cost-...
- lifeisstillgood 8y agoWatch the last few minutes of The Ipcress File with Michael Caine - he walks out of his bosses office and across London's Trafalgar Square - and the whole place is black with a century of soot. It's astounding as i have only ever known it after a mass sand blasting in the eighties (my Blue Peter Annual showed pictures)