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Salt’s Mill

Richard Bell’s Wild West Yorkshire nature diary,  Wednesday, 30th, December  2009

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Wakefield, 10 a.m.

WE'RE HAVING a bit of sleety rain and snow is forecast for the Pennines but today is our last opportunity to use our Metro Day Rover before it expires at the end of the year.

There's a pigeon's eye view of Westgate - including Clark's Brewery, established in 1906, from the waiting room in Wakefield Westgate Station. This view is more inspiring than the view you get of the city on a train approaching from the north; a few months ago you'd have seen the stone towers of County Hall and the Town Hall and the medieval spire of the Cathedral. Now those have been blotted out by a wall of black - interspersed with yellow - of the new multi-storey car park.

There's more development in Wakefield than I can ever remember. The phrase that Private Eye used to use in their Nooks & Corners column comes to mind: 'the city has been dragged kicking and screaming into the 1960s'.

Saltaire

Saltaire, by contrast, has gained World Heritage Status. Salts Mill, built by Victorian industrialist and philanthropist Sir Titus Salt, has everything we need for a winter's day out; a spacious bookshop, an inspiring art shop and exhibitions of work by local artists and by David Hockney. In the current show, Hockney's use of colour in the half-size replicas of some of his stage sets, for Rakes Progress and The Mikado are an inspiration for me as I prepare to start work on the scenery for the pantomime by our local amateur dramatic society.

The Mill is right next to the station so it's ideally placed for a winter's visit using our Day Rover.

Here  are my customary sketches made on the train.

As I scanned my sketches, I discovered a useful new button in my scanning program 'Deletes all cropping frames'. Cropping frames in this case means the frames I put round my individual drawings in the program to indicate which I want to scan.

In the days before Sir Titus made his fortune from the mechanisation of  textile production, ‘Delete all cropping frames' could well have served as a rallying call for the Luddites as in 1812 they targeted the cropping frames that were putting the hand shearers out of work.

Shearing and cropping were ways of taking the nap (rough projecting threads) off woven woollen cloth.