More Windows from Salts Mill

Today I bring you not just one, but twenty or more windows from the shop on the ground floor of Salts Mill in Saltaire. Its magnificent bookshop is upstairs, but here, as you come in, you can buy posters and cards, stationery and supplies, art materials – all temptingly laid out for browsers who wander around this space, decorated with vast ceramic pieces from Leeds-based Burmantofts pottery, elegant vases of fresh lilies. The window in the featured photo is in the entrance hall to the Mill, and hints at the treasures to be found within.

For Monday Windows, hosted this week by Brian of Bushboy’s World.

A Monday Window from Saltaire

The other week, we visited Saltaire. It’s a Victorian Model Village built near Bradford by mill owner Titus Salt. Built between 1851 and 1871, it was a philanthropic project to provide better living conditions for the workers of his Salts Mill than were available in the crowded city slums. The village was designed with well-constructed houses, a church, a school, a library, and a park. But no pub. Salt had seen the dire consequences over-consumption of cheap liquor could have on workers and their families, so emphatically – no pub. Hence the name of this modern bar, which reflects Titus’ mill in its windows. The village and mill deserve a post to themselves. That’ll be for another day.

For Monday Window, this week hosted this week by PR

Monday Window, Monday Sunrise

A sunrise captured in one of our downstairs windows one December morning. This image always makes me happy, so I’ll make it a bonus post for Ann-Christine’s This Made Me Smile challenge too.

For Brian’s Monday Window,

And Ann-Christine (Leya)’s Lens-Artists Challenge #326 – This Made Me Smile

Reflections

This post is just an excuse to share a few photos from the outside of Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona and the modern buildings round and about. When I went, the music festival Primavera Sound was in full swing in the evenings – Emily and Miquel had been the night before – so whole swathes of the area were out of bounds. My plans to explore were curtailed.

So after I’d ‘done’ the museum (maybe worth a post later?) I caught a tram to the Port Olímpic.

Both areas are full of glass-clad buildings reflecting images of the space in which they stood. Connecting with them, just too late for me to pop them into Donna’s Lens-Artists Challenge: Connections. You can connect with me too – two and a half times – there I am in the last photo of all, snapping away.

For Ludwig’s Monday Window.

A Window on a Small French Village

Last week, I showed you a rather characterful shuttered window I’d spotted in a French village. Many of you really liked it, so I’m showing it again in my featured photo, but in colour this time, Which version do you prefer?

While we’re about it, here are a few more shots from Siran, most of which include the odd window, or has-been window.

Monday Window.

A Window on a Vet’s World

This is a window designed in honour of a vet – James Herriott. He (under his real name of James Alfred Wight) made his name by writing a whole series of books about being a young vet in Darrowby (actually Thirsk) visiting farms and their animals hither and yon in the Yorkshire Dales from the 1930s onwards. If you don’t know his books, you may know one of the TV series going out under the name of All Creatures Great and Small: 1978 & 2020, as apparently they’re doing the rounds the world over.

Well, there’s a museum in Thirsk as well – World of James Herriott – occupying the house he and his family lived and worked in all those years ago. And it has a window celebrating the landscape that formed the backdrop to his work. Here it is as the featured photo. And here is a bit of a collage of the backdrop to the working week of any Yorkshire vet, then and now. Except I haven’t got a picture of the White Horse at Kilburn featured in the window. About 170 years ago, it was cut into the landscape to emulate the chalk hill figures of southern England, and Herriott, like all the rest of us, would see it often as he drove round and about the area.

If you’re in the area and want a good family-friendly destination, the museum is highly recommended. You’ll come away with all the older family members saying ‘I remember those’, as they peer at tea-cosies, mangles and a thoroughly ancient car (Gumdrop, anyone?), bemused by the vetinary equipment, and entertained by the quizzes and activities in the children’s gallery. You too can insert your arm into a cow’s rear end to deliver a reluctant calf.

And for a bit of context, here’s a view from a window in the museum.

Monday Window