Website Peter Mitchell - photographer - Leeds

Neil

Western Thunderer
Earlier this week I saw the final episode in the excellent BBC series, Britain in Focus. As well as featuring the work of John Bulmer whose fantastic book, The North, I recommended some time ago it also mentioned Leeds photographer Peter Mitchell. The images rang a bell as many years ago I picked up a set of postcards of his work from Leeds art gallery. I was taken on many trips to Leeds from my home in York when I was growing up during the sixties and seventies and these photos bring memories flooding back. Here's a link to some of his work depicting the Leeds of that era. Though it captures that era to a T, it looks significantly different to most models set in that time and place. I'm convinced that many modellers while building or buying accurate models of stock and railway structures appropriate to the sixties and seventies than go on to surround them with domestic and industrial architecture more suited to recent times. Many art photos are monochrome, these colour images are particularly valuable as they set the scene over the railway boundary fence in an unambiguous way.
 

Stoke5D

Western Thunderer
It's a good point about the correct style of buildings on layouts set in the 50's/60's/70's. I grew up in the 70's in a traditional Industrial Revolution era North Midlands city, and there was little demolition or change in that period. The same factories, coal mines, steelworks, streets, shops and public buildings as had been built over the previous hundred years or so were still there and largely unaltered, with some limited 'new' build like 50's council estates, schools etc. Only in the 80's did all that come to be swept away. Even paint schemes, enamel signs and the like were very much of an earlier era. Cars and clothes fashions were more of their time (but even then not entirely with plenty of older cars running around and older people usually traditionally dressed), however, buildings, definitely not so much.

Andrew
 

hrmspaul

Western Thunderer
This is an interesting topic. Having been brought up in Staines the amount of domestic building was enormous in the 1950s and 60s. In contrast, and in contrast to Stoke5D I was a student in Liverpool from the late 1960s to early 1970s. I had also visited relatives there in the 1950s. It was amazingly Victorian in the 1950s, applalling slums and with bomb sites. By the early 1970s the Corporation had decided that they needed to speed up slum clearance and vast areas were laid waste as were some beautiful buildings (the Ice Store was removed for the Arndale centre - a magnificent neo classic building). My Polytechnic on Byrom Street, may have been were Cilla Black has played sand castles (this was a genuine advert for the Poly) but there was remarkably little left behind it and along the whole length of Scotland Road!

So my point is each area had a different rate of change and type of change - domestic rebuilding in Liverpool took ages to get underway because they preferred to break communities up and get them well out of town. Vandalism, copying the Corporation model, was worse than anything since! The under 10s were out of control!

As to fashion, I don't know that can be kept up with especially for the end of steam and blue diesel era. Older people may have stayed similar, but teens and twenties had remarkably different styles year on year. Some of us would be very embarrassed if more photos of us remained, fortunately they don't!

Paul Bartlett
 

Stoke5D

Western Thunderer
Paul

I suppose it shows how important it is to have photo's, films or whatever to refer to when planning a layout, even if it's not supposed to be a specific town or village but based on an area of the country, which most are.

Interesting to read your comments on Liverpool. My university girlfriend was from Liverpool, and visits there during the holidays during the early 80's were an experience... I remember fantastic merchant or sea captain houses on Rodney Street that were just vandalised shells. Not one of the UK's greatest examples of town planning and local governance, especially in that period...

As to fashion, yes, any teenager or young adult would be following the fashions of the day but the more mature person, not so much in my experience of the 70's. It's not like now, where parents embarrass their children with their attempts to dress 'fashionably'! You'd need to cover both for any Blue era layout.

Good topic Neil.

Andrew
 

hrmspaul

Western Thunderer
Paul


Interesting to read your comments on Liverpool. My university girlfriend was from Liverpool, and visits there during the holidays during the early 80's were an experience... I remember fantastic merchant or sea captain houses on Rodney Street that were just vandalised shells. Not one of the UK's greatest examples of town planning and local governance, especially in that period...

Good topic Neil.

Andrew
Liverpool had a serious problem. I remember early in my secondary schooling a book in our library discussing Liverpool as a very serious problem - at the then rate of slum clearance it would take 70 years - and presumably that didn't include the 1930s and onwards multi rise housing which we now consider to be slums - and many have been cleared. So the Corporation really got on with clearance and the population of the city fell by hundreds of thousands. I was interested because my mother was an Edwardian Liverpudlian. Aunt Mays greengrocers in Everton was quite an experience. As to Rodney street etc. yes a Sunday Times article had the area as one of the worst in the country. We looked at a flat in a huge house where the ceiling was so high we joked it had clouds - we walked straight out saying we couldn't afford to heat it.

The area I live in in York is beautiful, with large town houses (not on the Liverpool scale) around a green square; now they are valuable but it had been the red light, hippy multi occupancy district where children played with no shoes (a comment 20 years ago from the elderly taxi driver who drove us there when we were looking for the house we now occupy). It is yards from one of the steam age loco sheds and when anyone does major work in a house a 100 years of soot falls on them. It would have been filthy. Now we even have official control of the colour house fronts are painted! This country changes a lot!

Paul
 

cmax

Western Thunderer
Hi Neil,

Yes and hopefully a book to follow, Leeds has changed a hell of a lot over the last 20 years, never mind the previous 30, sometimes not for the better, but life moves on.

Gary
 
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