
Blackened Buildings of Manchester Before the Clean Air Act - monort
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/incoming/gallery/blackened-buildings-manchester-before-clean-8727918
======
toyg
I can’t believe the Manchester Evening News is on HN. I bet they’ve pillaged
these pics from Manchester Revisited (FB group).

As I said in another comment, look up the Lowry paintings to get an idea of
how bad the air was in industrial England. He lived in Salford, right beside
Manchester.

Most of Manchester city centre is old warehouses and offices, the city was
basically a giant coal-powered factory and distribution centre. The St. Anne
church in central Stockport (again near Manchester) didn’t get the cleaning
treatment until the 2010s, I honestly believed it was just built black.

Imperial Britain was basically like today’s China: bustling, polluted,
exploiting the poor and vulnerable (child labor etc etc), with no care
whatsoever for consequences as long as someone was getting rich.

~~~
jwdunne
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.

~~~
delibes
Even stranger to see Eccles and Irlam mentioned by someone here - I grew up in
those two places!

You mean the Bridgewater Mill by Patricroft bridge, right? If you're
interested in Victorian era tech, there's also a Nasmyth steam hammer a little
bit up Worsley Road.

[https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-
manches...](https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-
news/steam-hammer-refit-salford-thor-9472716)

~~~
jwdunne
Grew up in Irlam, went to school in Eccles! Lots of family in Eccles too.
Small world!

That's the one. I'll check that out - I love stuff like this. The entire canal
has a lot of great historic stuff along it. I used to cycle down it to work in
Media City and if it's not tech, it's beautiful scenery all the way down.

------
simias
While I'm sure my lungs are very thankful for the regulation I really dig the
ominous look of the blackened buildings. Reminds me of the Cologue cathedral:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Gothic-C...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Gothic-
Cologne-Cathedral-004.jpg)

~~~
toyg
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.

~~~
willyt
Better architects of the period understood the effects of soot and played to
them. Because houses were heated with coal it was a problem even before the
industrial revolution. As such, some architectural historians believe that
buildings shouldn’t be cleaned for that reason.

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Reason077
10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister’s official residence, famously has
black-painted bricks in order to mimick the effects of coal smog.

Apparently, when cleaned in the 1960s to reveal it’s yellow London bricks, it
just didn’t look right!

[http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-10-downing-street-door-
is-...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-10-downing-street-door-is-
black-2015-12)

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

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noer
I grew up in Pittsburgh. During my childhood I remember a lot of black stone
buildings. I always assumed there was some kind of dark colored stone that was
used to build buildings & churches. It wasn't until I was 12 or so that these
buildings started getting cleaned that I realized they were all soot stained.

~~~
Isamu
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...](https://www.reddit.com/r/powerwashingporn/comments/6ev3pe/carnegie_library_being_sand_blasted_in_1990/)

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

~~~
milesokeefe
Some power washers integrate sand into the water stream. So sandblasted, but
by a high pressure jet of water carrying sand instead of air blasted sand.

------
lostlogin
Possibly related - London’s Great Fog of 1952 was a big catalyst for change,
with 4000-12,000 dying in a few days due to health problems from the fog. It
was pretty grim.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London)

------
handelaar
Most UK cities looked like this for the entire portion of my life I wasn't
allowed to vote yet. I grew up in London (and slightly in Edinburgh area) and
the centres of Edinburgh and Glasgow were pitch black all over right into the
late 1980s when the sandwashing _began_.

This photo of London St Pancras station, for example, looks like it is colour-
drained, but that's really how it looked until they washed the building in the
90s.

[https://farm2.static.flickr.com/1818/43873591751_154164f8d5_...](https://farm2.static.flickr.com/1818/43873591751_154164f8d5_b.jpg)

That sign was inlined with slightly-feeble red neon, and that will remain my
mental image of how this station looks even though obviously it's been utterly
transformed since:

[https://blackcablondon.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/st-
pancra...](https://blackcablondon.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/st-pancras-
front.jpg)

------
JeanMarcS
I remember in 1997 in Toulouse/France, they cleaned a lot of building before
hosting some games of the 1998 FIFA World Cup.

It was a shock to realize how dirty they were before that !

------
mirimir
The site says "soot". But I wonder if these are limestone or marble faced, and
it's mainly from SOx pollution.

~~~
toyg
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.

~~~
Steve44
The site [https://ourworldindata.org/london-air-
pollution](https://ourworldindata.org/london-air-pollution) has a chart part
way down showing the suspended particulate matter (SPM) in London's air from
1700 to 2016 - basically soot.

It peaked in about 1890 when GB was using about 160 million tonnes per year.

------
nsxwolf
Now I'm wondering how many modern movies about pre-1960s London get this
historical detail right.

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danans
Was in Sheffield recently, not far from Manchester. The town hall still
appears to have the sooty facade. In the context of all the new stuff
surrounding it, the sooty building kind of looks nice. Maybe it's worth
keeping some of these in their sooty state as a reminder (and warning) of how
horrible the air once was?

------
0x7f800000
Proof at last! I always felt that the chimney sweeps seemed way too happy.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I-b_GJ4ltk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I-b_GJ4ltk)

------
singularity2001
Clean Air Act combined with some wall cleaning acts, beautiful.

------
lifeisstillgood
Watch the last few minutes of The Ipcress File with Michael Caine - he walks
out of his bosses office and across London's Trafalgar Square - and the whole
place is black with a century of soot. It's astounding as i have only ever
known it after a mass sand blasting in the eighties (my Blue Peter Annual
showed pictures)

------
emmelaich
I'd very much like to know when the blackened buildings were photo'd.
Something more precise than "before the 60s"

Also (2015)

~~~
DanBC
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.

------
nautilus12
Why is it that the lightest part of the Spring Gardens before cleaning happen
to be the darkest parts after cleaning?

------
jordn
Were these buildings then cleaned, or do the buildings "recover" through
natural processes (rain etc)?

~~~
berkut
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.

------
gcb0
[https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-
region/cost-...](https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-region/cost-
v-benefit-clearing-the-air)

------
mattlondon
A huge difference.

Imagine what it will look like when we ban diesel from urban & suburban areas!

~~~
Joeri
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.)

~~~
KozmoNau7
I sold my car earlier this year, and started bicycle commuting again about a
month ago. I honestly hadn't realized just how wasteful of space car traffic
is.

When I commuted by public transit, It was mostly not directly visible to me,
especially when I took the train and just bypassed all the traffic. But riding
my bike, I see just how clogged up the roads get, and just how much the flow
gets disturbed by people blocking intersections and creating gridlock.

The vast majority of these cars are only transporting a single occupant, even
the huge 7-seat SUVs. The amount of wasted space is simply astounding.

If we could keep even just the city centers free of cars, there would be so
much more space available for pedestrians and cyclists and _city life_. Sure,
allow some commercial traffic, such as deliveries, tradesmen with jobs to do
in the city, buses and taxi services.

Ban all private car traffic, and only hand out temporary permits for
transporting home bulky objects or similar short-term undertakings. Price it
so that people won't just buy one every single day. Maybe set a limit on how
many permits are allowed per month, to prevent the wealthy from gaming the
system.

Quality of life would increase _massively_.

~~~
mattlondon
They kinda tried that in London with congestion charging - i.e. you have to
pay £11.50 or £21.50 (depending on vehicle) a day to drive into central
London.

Latest data I could easily find
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge))
was that after 10 years of operation it reduced traffic by 10% (ten). A report
from 2014 said that traffic levels are now close to pre-congestion-charge
levels ([https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/roads/cc-changes-
march-2014...](https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/roads/cc-changes-
march-2014/user_uploads/cc-impact-assessment.pdf)). The public buses and
privately-run taxis are _everywhere_ and are significant causes of traffic in
my anecdotal experience (e.g. bus blocking the road waiting for someone to
finish talking to the driver, bus blocking junction, buses blocking road
waiting to get into bus stop where 5 other buses already are waiting to pick-
up or put-down, taxi-drivers stopping in illegal places to drop people off or
doing illegal u-turns etc etc. Whats worse is the buses are diesel and pump
out loads of fumes from their heavy diesel engines. Bus ridership is falling
([http://www.mayorwatch.co.uk/londons-bus-ridership-is-
falling...](http://www.mayorwatch.co.uk/londons-bus-ridership-is-falling-
three-times-faster-than-the-rest-of-englands/)) yet we still have to put up
with them and their diesel.

tl;dr - charging doesn't work at the £10-20/day prices (equivalent to 3.6 to
6.7 Big Macs on the BigMacIndex a day to drive into london)

I guess it might work if the fees go up an order of magnitude.

------
crc32
A good example of government regulation improving quality of life!

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

~~~
pmorici
If you were allowed to sue polluters for damages to your property is a common
example I've seen. So for example you notice your building is being blackened
and sue the coal fired plant down the street for the cleaning fees to restore
it's facade.

Sounds good but it is totally impractical if you've had any experience with
the legal system.

~~~
qlm
What if there are many factories owned by different businesses producing the
pollution? Do you sue all of them?

What if the cost of cleaning is smaller than the cost of changing business
practices to protect health and the environment?

~~~
pmorici
Yes, one of the many reasons it is totally impractical.

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singularity2001
Meta: instead of accepting cookies click at 'manage' and be in awe.

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

~~~
Joeri
Which is in violation of GDPR, so very odd they go through all the effort to
almost be compliant without actually getting the benefit of compliance.

~~~
rcMgD2BwE72F
This way, they get people to think that GDPR has little effect and is mostly a
burden.

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adrianN
This site makes me click a hundred times to opt out of cookies. No thanks.

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

~~~
village-idiot
I think the UKs relationship with EU regulations at this point is ....
complicated.

