The 'Goners' Of Leeds, England

Thank You Brian !
Loved it
Too short , would have loved more picturesand stories
Charming that 76 yr old’s hermit cottage
 
Yes thanks Brian, nice pictures and interesting story. I'm sure many of us regret not taking more pictures - and pictures of the everyday background to our lives - when we were younger!
 
Old, good England. I have been in Leeds, but in nineties.
Agree with topic above.
Both countries I'm resident of were/are under heavy ideology. Both are into crazy ideas of globalization and relocation of nations and destruction of anything which is old.
I was and in the city, town affected by it most.

Yearlier this week I was thinking about letting of some my equipment go, sits one and more years not so much in use and getting field camera. But I realized what I would not find many of my regular still subjects to photograph anymore. So much is gone within 16 years.
All was buldozered to bring thousands of cookie cutters and ugly post industrial zones...
 
Anything and everything would go if it didn't, or doesn't, conform to the planners' schemes. There is a wonderful art deco building in Plymouth, one of the very few buildings in the city centre to survive the 1941 blitz there, but it will be going soon to be replaced by architecturally low grade mediocrity.

I remember in 1982 catching the train from home in Plymouth to go to an interview in Durham, about as long a journey as you can do within England. From Burton onwards was red-brick industry, mines, slag heaps, terraced housing, smoke stained and war damaged. All now going or long gone, to be replaced by light industrial or warehousing. I don't do nostalgia particularly, many of these places were in dire need of replacement, but it was more than simply buildings that went.

A lovely photo essay, I've seen some before, but thanks very much for the link!
 
Bank branch offices are this generations ‘goners’ ; Petrol stations will be next, so better set about recording them.
 
Inadvertently I have become an amateur photo historian / archivist. When I began using 35mm in 1971, I photographed my neighborhood in Venice, CA, Ocean Park, Santa Monica, UCLA, and buildings in downtown LA. My influence on photographing cities was from Andreas Feininger. Sadly, I was too late for the astonishingly beautiful art deco Atlantic Richfield building in onyx and gold.

Later in life, in the Pacific Northwest, I photographed farmland, small towns, empty areas between neighborhoods - always knowing how much would disappear in 20-30 years.

The fragility of beautiful things became clear to me a few years ago: every week I'd travel to a photo store and in that neighborhood was a small building with a few art deco features. I'd somehow ignored the building for a few years. One day I said "I should bring my camera next week and make a photo of that building". In the meantime, I made a cellphone photo of it. The next week, that building was being demolished!
 
FrozenInTime said:
Bank branch offices are this generations ‘goners’ ; Petrol stations will be next, so better set about recording them.
Click to expand...

Pubs as well in the UK and a lot of the 'High street'.

Great article and images, there are some more here (just need to disable adblocker)
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-...he-1970s-reveal-a-vanished-world-8701461.html

It's funny how the wheel turns with industrialised settings like those he's captured. I imagine when they built many of the buildings captured, the mood was sombre at their arrival and what they heralded and yet here we are getting misty eyed at their crumbling destruction and feeling the same feelings as awful new build estates or whatever go up to replace them.
Hopefully more people will come along and make them crumbling and chaotic eventually so we can repeat the cycle?
 
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