George Bradshaw is best know for publishing railway timetables, but he also published a number of guides to the places the railway lines passed through. While there were a number of versions of these guides, as I mentioned above, this particular book collects together the four volumes and reflects the railway as it was in 1863. Given that both the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway and the Yorkshire and Lancachire Railway had both reached Penistone by 1863, the first thing I looked for was an entry for Penistone.
I eventually found Penistone on page 52 of part 4 and it would appear that Bradshaw (or more likely someone working for his company, as he died in 1853) didn't really think much of the area as the full entry reads:
This is a small market town, situated on the banks of the Don, in the midst of a wild and dreary district. It contains several large cotton and woollen factories, and a free Grammar School.Today Penistone is a still an active market town set in wonderful countryside that I challenge anyone to call dreary, even when the weather is miserable!
We'll have to see what Michael Portillo thinks of Penistone when series 5 of Great British Railway Journeys airs on TV. Although the list of journeys hasn't yet been announced my next door neighbour saw him with a TV crew a few stations up the line earlier in the summer.
This like many old travel guides sounds like a good read. I can imagine these valleys being a vision from hell. It's not too long ago that the east end of Sheffield was awful.
ReplyDeleteYeah I can imagine that when the steel works in Penistone was at its largest then the town may have been pretty grim with all the smoke and fumes. I would have thought that in 1863 it wouldn't have been so bad though with just a cotton mill or two.
DeleteI'm sure I'll find other interesting gems in the book that might become the basis of future posts as it really is an interesting read.
Mark, please just ignore this if you've already talked about it in earlier blogs - I haven't read them all. Some of those buildings in the picture above look good. Have you tried doing any buildings in Blender?
ReplyDeleteI've been piddling with it occasionally. I had a heck of a time with scale but have that pretty much under control. Of course, it is Blender so there's all kinds of stuff I don't know yet. I would appreciate anything you have to say on the subject.
Hi David, I did have a try and modelling a small brick structure in blender, but I'm thinking I went about it the wrong way. My problem is that I was wanting to 3D print the structure and so for that I needed to model each brick and piece of mortar rather than using a texture for a nice visual rendering. I managed to produce some nice bricks and some array modifiers that would build walls, but unfortunately it quickly became unworkable as the number of triangles exploded meaning that even rotating the view could take an awfully long time. It might be there is a better way of doing this but at that point I went back to refining some of my earlier wagon models. I might try giving buildings another go at some point though, and I'm sure that if I do there will be a blog post about it.
DeleteMark, I'll try it later but if you do a brick then extrude the edges out a bit and scale in that should give you a brick with half a mortar joint all round. It should then be possible to duplicate this then stack them together. Once you have a fair bit of wall select all and save it. I imagine it will be possible to then build any amount of wall by slotting this unit together.
DeleteThat's probably a more sensible approach than mine. I had each brick as a separate item (randomly disturbed to make sure they weren't all entirely identical) with a gap between them. They were then overlaid on a thinner base wall to give the mortar (which had the advantage of being able to build interlocking corners without the mortar getting in the way). Any suggestions though would be greatly received!
DeleteWhat I have been doing is trivial indeed compared to what to you tried to do. I had not even thought about texture. Of course I don't understand why but I can see that applying textures would not work for 3D printing as I'm guessing the textures are just 2D images.
DeleteCouldn't you go ahead and build the building smooth, then actually texture the surface randomly? Seems like I remember something about making a surface rough. Maybe then you could overlay that with the mortar joints, select all the mortar on one plane and then indent. Rendering would still be massive...
Mark, you are right it is complicated. I have spent a couple of hours messing with mirror modifiers. If the answer lies in that direction I'll stand hanging. I have gone back to my original work flow. Your bricks are 9"x4.25"x 3.75" deep. Deep being the 'Z' axis. The bond should be 0.6". I went and measured one today. I am turning into an anorak.
DeleteOld guide books can be fascinating sources of information and entertainment especially when read in comparison with others describing the same place. I can imagine that not only would they change as the places change but also as the intended readers' wants are catered for. I have thought of trying to get a guide book of Napier from 20 years ago and comparing it with today. Many buildings and attractions are the same but the whole tourist and population cultures have changed.
ReplyDelete