Continuing this months look at brand new “old” photos, exclusively being seen online for the first time. Today we have a couple of photos of the demolition of Blantyre Mills.
Taken in 1904 it shows the mills being demolished literally brick by brick. Its easy to forget what a labour intensive job the demolition must have been without the machinery and equipment of the modern era. These may have been demolished by sledgehammer, the separate piles of brick lying around where gangs of men were working. To the right you will see the old sluice machinery, stripped out and sitting on the riverbank.
You can see from the bricks, remnants of the former white paint that once decorated these buildings, for these mill buildings were all once whitewashed. You can see in one of the pictures, the deep channel which formed the mill lade. The building being demolished once was the former Gas Works. The small footbridge which connected the foreground building to the gasworks is shown spanning over the lade.
Today, the entrance on to the current bridge sits at this location, the hydro building and fish ladder to the right, of the photos, which are all taken on the Blantyre side of the river.
(c) 2016 Blantyre Project
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Alex Houston Yes even in those days everything was recycled and the demolshers did not need to be told that,then around about the 1980 government put a stop to timber ,brick and quite a few other materials being recycled,until some bright spark in government insisted not enough was being done to recycle building materials,yes it was the same political party involved on both occasions then introduced the biggest tax con on the public by introducing land fill tax,a portion would be put into use for local good use ,but never stated what size the portion would be