Jerusalem

This is another view that I see as I walk to work. It's the chimney of Victoria Mills, once a textile mill, recently converted into apartments. It's half a mile along the Aire valley from Salts Mill and was built about 20 years later, in the 1870s, by Henry Mason. It wasn't nearly as big as Salts Mill but in its heyday it was still one of the 'big four' significant mills in Bradford in terms of manufacturing worsted cloth. It does, however, retain one feature that Salts has lost - the ornate top of the chimney stack.

I love the juxtaposition of the old industrial buildings against the soft green backdrop of Baildon Moor - so typical of West Yorkshire as a whole, where the mills nestle in the valley bottoms and the fields and moors soar over them.... immortalised of course in William Blake's famous poem, now the epic anthem "Jerusalem".

And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God on England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, among these dark Satanic Mills?

(This quotation once memorably won a newspaper competition - "Questions to which the answer is NO"!)