Blackened Buildings of Manchester Before the Clean Air Act

>He lived in Salford, right beside Manchester.

Salford is literally "Dirty Old Town"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wj7xZf8xm8

I 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.

Things are much better now, but there's still some progress to be made.

I live in Southern England, and my HEPA air filter looks black after 12 months of filtration indoors. It's super scary.

My windows have very noticeable black particles outside, probably originating from combustion engines and coal power plants.

I can't wait till we get rid of those. Walking or biking downtown Oxford or Cambridge during rush hour feels really unhealthy. You can smell diesel fumes from buses, lorries and cars every second.

It's also worth pointing out that Trafford Park, only 3 miles from the centre, was proudly claimed to have been the densest industrial development on the planet until the end of the war. It was the primary target of the Manchester blitz, as there was much aircraft (Avro) and tank (Vickers) production, not to forget Ford's old plant producing Merlins, and the ICI plant. Also home to lots of warehouses and food companies including the then fairly new Kellogg's plant. There were bomb sites that lasted into the 80s. The big Royal Ordnance plant in Patricroft (Bridgewater Foundry) hung on until the 90s.

There was a lot of industry packed in between the ship canal and the Bridgewater.

Fancy apartments in Salford Quays were only possible after a lot of decline.

This should be a frightening reminder to some of the cities in China and India that are heavily industrializing with more than 10x the population of Manchester.

Believe 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.

They 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_...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2014_Prowincja_Szira...

As 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.

10 Downing Street in London was similarly yellow darkened by soot. During the refurbishment they decided to paint the yellow bricks to maintain the classic look of the building.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Downing_Street#Rebuilding:_...

Here is a painting of how the Cologne cathedral looked shortly after its completion: http://www.altertuemliches.at/files/langl_dom_352613_01_kl_0...

During the WWII bombings, the cathedral was damaged at the front, which was repaired only recently. The original color can also be seen there: http://in0.bilderbuch-koeln.de/bilder/k%C3%B6ln_altstadt_nor...

As you can see, the repaired area is already blackening again. AFAIK, this is inevitable with this kind of stone.

passenger ships used to have black hulls from the coal loading ports on down to mask the markings.

Here'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/ca...

They say "sand blasted" but I'm pretty sure they used gentler methods.

It'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

Look 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.

Judging by the cars I'd say mid- to late-60s. I can see both Mk 1 and Mk 2 Ford Cortinas in several shots.

In 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.

The 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.

The 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.

I think cleaned by sand-blasting...

Several cities in the UK (Bath, Coventry in particular) I remember as a child in the 80s suddenly had a lot of buildings that were no longer black.

They need to be cleaned. The elements actually make things worse.

Or 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.)

Well, it would have happened sooner and more efficiently if the invisible hand of the market were only permitted to operate freely.

This 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).

Can one of the HN free-marketeers explain how this sort of thing would arise "naturally" through market forces, without regulatory intervention?

Making GDPR rights cumbersome to claim.

Checkmarks are ticked by default, so it looks like opt out, not opt in.

I always click manage and opt out and insane opt outs like this is actually quite common, a lot of news sites with tracking seem to have like 50-100 opt outs, it's insane.

There seems to be a company providing this as a service and their's is one of the worst, with a load of the sites requiring you to go to distinct external sites to opt out.

I was surprised by that as well, especially since it's in the UK. Surely that can't be GPDR compliant.

you can just click to deny all the categories and everything in the "partners" tab disappears.

"Fanboy's Annoyance List" in uBlock takes care of it.