sowerbybridge

Unblogged October

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A photo of Fountains Church on Chester Street in Bradford

Last month, for the first time, I did a summary blog post of things we did in September, but that didn’t merit a whole blog post. So here’s some of the things I did this month.

Away day in a former nightclub

Every now and again, we have an ‘away day’ at work. This time, it was hosted at Fountains Church, located on Chester Street in Bradford, pictured above. I’ve been in the building before it was a church, as it used to be three separate nightclubs: Revolution (the national chain of vodka bars), Walkabout (the national chain of Australian-themed bars) and Dr Livingstone’s, a nightclub themed around Dr David Livingstone, a colonialist and explorer. I visited them all regularly back when I was a student.

It was weird seeing the building now used as a place of worship.

A blue postbox in Manchester

A blue postbox on Liverpool Road in Manchester

On the way back from seeing Brains, Bogies and You, we walked past a blue postbox on Liverpool Road in Manchester. Normally, British postboxes are painted red (or occasionally gold), so this one is unusual.

Fortunately, a plaque on the side explains all. Originally, blue postboxes were more common, as they were used for air mail post. Nowadays, air mail no longer needs to be sorted separately from domestic post, and so all but one of these have been removed. The only remaining genuine blue air mail post box is outside Windsor Castle. This one is actually just a regular post box, painted blue.

This specific post box was painted blue because it sits next to what was the Manchester Aerospace Museum. This later became the Air and Space Hall of the Museum of Science and Industry, but was permanently closed a few years ago.

Playing with an ESP development board

Back in July, I picked up an ESP development board (sponsored link) to use as a firmware flasher. I’ve been experimenting with it, to try to add Wi-Fi control to an existing non-smart device. Let’s just say that I need more soldering practice, but I’m hoping to write more about it should I succeed.

Danny Boyle in Sowerby Bridge

I didn’t spot the film crew myself, but Danny Boyle has been filming scenes for his new film Ink in Sowerby Bridge, near where we live. It’s a biographical film about the early life of Rupert Murdoch. It’ll be interesting to see if we can recognise the filming locations when the film comes out.

Much of Happy Valley was also filmed locally, as was the more recent CBBC series High Hoops, so we often see filming trucks parked up around the town.

Old posts brought back

I’ve also re-instated a number of old blog posts written in October 2015 from the Web Archive. These include Losing the Language of Love, which I quite enjoyed reading again, and several posts from a trip to London that month:

We also went to Crossness Pumping Station on that trip, but unfortunately my post about it was never indexed by the Web Archive and so it’s probably lost forever. It’s a shame – it’s a very interesting place. It’s not often that a sewage pumping station would be Grade I listed, and it’s only open on selected days of the year.

Snow longer welcome

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A photo of a snowy scene, taken from our house

I can’t remember a time that there’s been snow on the ground for eight days straight. It’s certainly not happened in my adult life; it may have happened when I was much younger, perhaps in the late 1980s or early 1990s. But the heavy snow that we had last Sunday has stuck around for over a week now, thanks to low temperatures that have prevented it all from melting.

I’m writing this yesterday (Sunday 11th January) and it’s probable that most of the snow will start to melt today (Monday). Yesterday (Sunday), the temperatures reached a ‘dizzying high’ of 4° C (39° F), which is the warmest it’s been all week. Meanwhile, night-time temperatures have apparently dropped as low as -10° C (14° F).

Suffice to say, it’s been an interesting week. The school that our nine-year-old attends announced it would be closed on Monday. As it’s the 21st century, thankfully this wasn’t a case of listening to local radio, but a message via the parents’ app just after 7am. Also, as it’s the 21st century and in the years following a pandemic, us parents were provided with the schoolwork that our kids would be doing if they were in school. I booked last minute annual leave with my (thankfully) understanding employer, and we got to work. Thankfully, most of it was Maths, and so not something I struggle with.

Tuesday was a return to relative normality as the school re-opened, but many other local schools remained closed throughout last week (some are still closed today, as in Monday). I even made it into the office on Tuesday, as the trains were running with almost no delays. However, many of my colleagues didn’t, and those of us that did were advised to head home mid-afternoon. We’ve then spent the rest of the week working remotely. I am very pleased that we have this option.

A photo of our In Home Display, showing £64.03 spent on gas this week.

Temperatures should continue to rise, and so whilst there will probably still be snow on the ground this morning, at least we won’t also have ice to contend with. And I’m hoping our heating bills will come down too; as per the photo above, we had spent over £64 on gas this week alone. Some of this is because we were home more, but also because of how cold it was outside.

So, here’s looking forward to some warmer weather. The snow has been fun for a while, but it has outstayed its welcome.

Sowerby Bridge blog posts

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A photo the Rochdale Canal at Sowerby Bridge, with some geese in the foreground and a church in the background.

It’s been a while since I last did a summary of old blog posts that I’ve made live again – January, to be precise. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t re-imported any old blog posts since then – I’ve probably brought back 20 or so in the past few months. They’ve tended to refer to events that I’ve wanted to refer back to in new blog posts, such as previous visits to places. Overall, I’ve re-instated over 100 old blog posts so far, so about 3% of the total.

The latest batch that I’ve brought back are about Sowerby Bridge, the town where we live. I’ve chosen these partly to document us moving here 14 years ago, but also because it’s niche content that’s probably not available elsewhere. Here’s an index:

  • Moving out of the City (October 2010). When I first announced that we were looking to move to Sowerby Bridge, as it was convenient for both my current job, and Christine’s (then) new job. Neither of us could drive back then.
  • A year out of the city (November 2011). A retrospective of our first year of living in Sowerby Bridge. The first flat that we rented didn’t work out, but we ended up in another flat in April 2011, that we stayed in until October 2015 when we moved into our current house.
  • Cinemas and Sowerby Bridge (May 2012). A little bit of local history research. Sowerby Bridge once had two cinemas – whilst both buildings are still standing, one is now a pub/venue and the other mostly vacant, having most recently been a shop.
  • Rushbearing in Sowerby Bridge (September 2012). Sowerby Bridge’s most well-known annual festival, which takes place over the first weekend in September. Imagine a cart, filled with rushes, being trailed by morris dancers and calling at every church and pub in the town. It’s still going strong, although we had other commitments this year.
  • Britain’s best high streets (November 2012). Sowerby Bridge was included in a list of Britain’s best high streets, and I suppose the main street is still pretty good. However, we’ve since lost the two banks mentioned in the article.
  • The Sowerby Bridge Geese (September 2013). For years, there was a large gaggle of geese in Sowerby Bridge, that would happily stop traffic to cross the road, or sit in parking spaces. Unfortunately they haven’t had any goslings for a few years now, and I think there’s only three of them left now.
  • My first BuzzFeed Listicle (April 2014). Oh wow, remember BuzzFeed? It still seems to be going, but my first listicle, 9 Surprising Facts About Sowerby Bridge, also turned out to be my last one.
  • Happy Valley (June 2014). The BBC’s gritty award-winning drama was partly set in Sowerby Bridge, and saw two further series.
  • The Brontë Garden at Sowerby Bridge station (September 2014). This is the small garden at the railway station, maintained by volunteers and still looking nice ten years on.

Since starting blogging again in 2022, my only new post of note about Sowerby Bridge was a brief one about ghost signs.

Flooding in Sowerby Bridge

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Yesterday, saw some of the worst flooding in living memory in our home town of Sowerby Bridge. This report from the BBC shows some photos, and the Sowerby Bridge photo is taken from the flats in which Christine and I lived in until we moved in September. We lived in a third-floor flat, and so we would not have been directly affected, but the plant room for the apartments was flooded and that might’ve knocked out our electrical supply. The car park was almost completely submerged as well, so if our car had been parked there it would have almost certainly been written-off, as it would have been inundated by the flood waters.
Fortunately, our new home is on significantly higher ground and so isn’t at risk of flooding.

The main roads in and out of the town were blocked due to the flood waters, and so we had to drive along the back roads to get out. And although the rain has now stopped, I expect it’ll be some time today before the water recedes. There will be many people whose homes will have been flooded, and some businesses will have a race against time to re-open for the new year.

Elsewhere, Hebden Bridge has been badly hit again, after sustaining devastating floods in the summer of 2012. It’s going to be a grim new year for many in the Calder Valley.

You can donate to the Calder Valley relief fund here.

20 is plenty

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20 is plenty

Across my home town of Sowerby Bridge, small white discs with red borders and the numbers 2 and 0 are appearing at the sides of the road. It’s the latest area in Calderdale to receive blanket 20 miles per hour speed limits on all suburban side streets, plus some major roads where required.

In Sowerby Bridge, this includes the main road through the town, the A58 – variously called Wharf Street, Town Hall Street or West Street depending on which bit you’re referring to. This makes sense; the road is quite narrow in places with parked cars and lots of pedestrians – particularly in the evening due to the town’s high concentration of pubs and bars. Although at peak times, 20 miles per hour is something of an aspiration as the traffic is regularly nose to tail in both directions.

The signs started to appear last week, following a consultation process. However, as yet there isn’t complete signage coverage and so it’s probably arguable as to whether the new lower speed limit is actually in force yet. I’ve been driving at the lower speed just in case, and to get used to it, since it’ll be the norm soon.

Although I’m now a driver myself, I’m in favour of the lower speed limits. I actually credit them with helping me pass my driving test in August; being able to get away with driving more slowly meant that I had more time to do my observations at junctions. Where the main roads remain at 30 mph, but the side roads are 20 mph, it discourages rat-running through housing estates. And where people actually obey the speed limit, it’s safer; as anyone who has recently taken their theory test will know, cars can brake more quickly at slower speeds. On residential streets, that’s very welcome.

Home Shopping, part II

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Hawes

2015 is the year when we buy a house, and this week we took a big leap towards that goal: we had an offer accepted.

We started looking at houses around three weeks ago, with our search focussed primarily on the Sowerby Bridge area where we’re currently renting a flat. In all we looked at five houses.

  1. House number one was terrible – a major water ingress problem with the roof, and only partly-renovated.
  2. House number two was much better and was our favourite initially. I’ve written about these two before.
  3. I quite liked the third house, but it wasn’t practical for us. It was up a very, very steep hill – as in, so steep that it has steps and cars have to take a longer route around – and was across four floors with narrow curved stairs. The interior was nice though, and the views out of the windows were great.
  4. House number four was big, and had several large rooms and a nice kitchen. It was also the only property we saw with a decent garden. Inside it had been renovated but there were some rather old-fashioned fixtures and fittings.
  5. The fifth and final house we saw was lovely inside, with a great bathroom and new kitchen, but no garden, and it wasn’t in a great area. It also had a leaking roof – top tip, look for houses in winter so you can feel how weather-proof they are.

The fourth house wasn’t perfect but the things that we didn’t like could be changed relatively quickly. We ended up putting three offers on, with the third accepted for a little below the asking price. We’ve also had approval in principle for a mortgage, and have enough money in our savings to cover a 10% deposit and fees.

House purchases can take time and there are various surveys to be undertaken first – plus the current owner needs to move out – but hopefully we’ll be moved in by the summer. The new house is only a few minutes walk from our current flat so moving shouldn’t be too difficult, and we can still reach everything we need by public transport. I’ll keep you posted.

The Brontë Garden at Sowerby Bridge station

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Brontë Garden

Last month a new garden was officially opened at Sowerby Bridge railway station. It’s called the Brontë Garden, and is maintained by volunteers from the Friends of Sowerby Bridge Railway Station. It sits on a small parcel of land next to the car park, opposite platform one.

The name comes from the station’s slightly tenuous link with the Brontë family. The Brontës hail from over the hills in Haworth, in the Worth Valley, but one of the Brontë siblings was employed at Sowerby Bridge station at its time of opening in the 1840s. He was Branwell Brontë, brother of the three famous sisters Emily, Anne and Charlotte. He was later appointed at another station further up the line at Luddendenfoot – this station succumbed to the rationalisation of the railways in the 1960s and no longer exists.

The Brontë Garden at Sowerby Bridge railway station

The garden isn’t particularly big but does house a bench and small gravelled area, along with some planters built using old railway sleepers. There’s also a restored luggage trolley, with opened suitcases serving as planters.

As well as the garden, the Friends of Sowerby Bridge Railway Station look after various other planters on the platforms, many of which are sponsored by local businesses. It’s a relatively young group, having only been formed in November 2010 (co-incidentally about the same time I moved to Sowerby Bridge). Whilst they are a voluntary group, they’ve done quite a bit to make the station look nicer – a hard ask, thanks to its brutal concrete architectural style.

Happy Valley

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Rainbow

Last week we belatedly started watching the BBC One drama series Happy Valley. It stars Sarah Lancashire as Sergeant Catherine Cawood, a policewoman still coming to terms with the suicide of her daughter, when the boy she blames her death on is released from prison. A parallel story thread sees a businessman dabble with the criminal underworld to get enough money to send his daughter to a private school.

All six hour-long episodes of Happy Valley have now aired, but they are available on BBC iPlayer for a couple more days (and you can download the episodes to keep for 30 days). I also expect that it’ll be available on DVD and other digital download services before too long. Happy Valley has been a very well-received series and is tipped for a BAFTA, and there’s talk of a second series.

Happy Valley is shot, and indeed set, in the Calder Valley where Christine and I live. Indeed, the police station where the lead character is based is our local station in Sowerby Bridge, which I pass on the way to work every day. Earlier in the year there were frequently film crews outside, and the signs on the front had been changed from ‘West Yorkshire Police’ to simply ‘Yorkshire Police’, a fictional police force. Unlike its portrayal in the series, the police station is no longer open to the public – an issue that our local MP took up in parliament several years ago. Other scenes are filmed elsewhere in Sowerby Bridge, and also further up the valley in Hebden Bridge, Heptonstall, Todmorden and in the shadow of Stoodley Pike.

Despite the title of ‘Happy Valley’, the series is quite gritty and, though it’s fictional, focuses on some of the area’s social problems. As an example, whilst Hebden Bridge has a reputation for being a tourist-friendly hippie lesbian preservation area, it also has high rates of drug abuse and suicide. The steep sides of the valley, and gentrification, are frequently blamed for the area’s ills.

We’ve only watched episode one so far, so no spoilers please.

My first BuzzFeed Listicle

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A screenshot of the 9 Surprising Facts About Sowerby Bridge listicle on BuzzFeed

Last week, whilst coming with ideas for a new blog post, I realised that one of them was essentially a BuzzFeed-style listicle. So, rather than posting it here, I decided to publish it as a community post on BuzzFeed. And so 9 Surprising Facts About Sowerby Bridge was born.

One of the main reasons why I did it was as an experiment, to see what kind of engagement community posts on BuzzFeed get. It’s something of a niche topic – I don’t know how many people would search for it, and I deliberately haven’t shared it on my own social media channels until now. Articles by BuzzFeed’s own journalists often do well with lots of clicks, but I’m under the impression that community posts can be somewhat hit and miss. We’ll see.

All but two of the photos were my own, linked to on Flickr.

In any case, I hope that it serves as an interesting look at my home town of Sowerby Bridge. It’s a town that’s overshadowed by its more famous neighbours of Halifax and Hebden Bridge, but has some of its own claims to fame. We’ve got Britain’s deepest canal lock, for example, and it’s possible to do a circular pub crawl taking in twelve pubs, almost all of which serve decent beer. There’s our annual Rushbearing festival, and we have a pretty good high street. It’s a surprising place and more people should take the time to come and visit, in my opinion.

The Sowerby Bridge Geese

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Geese

Pictured above are some of the geese that make up a gaggle in my home town of Sowerby Bridge. They nominally live on the River Ryburn, the smaller of Sowerby Bridge’s two rivers which joins the River Calder in the town. Usually they are found on the river outside the swimming pool, but occasionally they waddle a little further afield.

They never stray very far. I’ve never seen any of them fly – they will occasionally flap their wings but they don’t seem to be capable of using them. They just waddle or swim, and the furthest they get is a couple of streets away.

There are probably around 20 of them, and they tend to move together as one big gaggle. This helps when trying to cross the busy A58 road that runs through the town, which they often do, as this video shows. And frequently it’s at rush hour.

Their presence in the town is, unsurprisingly, controversial. Letters from concerned nearby residents have been sent to the local paper and local councillors. The local council have asked that the public do not feed them, and a sign stating this has appeared at one of their regular haunts. However it’s fair to say this sign is regularly ignored as I’ve often seen people throwing bread into the river for them.

I have to admit I’m mostly on the side of the geese (even if their honking occasionally wakes me up on weekend mornings). Whilst they can be a bit threatening to small children and have a habit of defecating a lot, I don’t think there are many humane ways of getting rid of them. And I think they add character to the town, especially in the spring when the newborn goslings hatch. There’s even a Facebook fan page with over 800 ‘likes’. They’ve been here longer than anyone can remember, and I don’t think the town would be the same without them.