iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

.... If we apply the same ratio between the two prices and base it on what I paid for a new suit a couple of weeks ago, the new house would cost £56,000.

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Two adverts from Halifax newspapers 100 years ago paint an interesting picture of society in the 1920s. One advert is for new suits, available from Sam Stocks for £5.50. The other advertises a competition to win a new house, fully fitted with electricity, or alternatively, a cheque for £2,000. ...

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.... As for the photographer, he is still just about keeping going, although he can no longer jump over a wall to take shots like this.

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

It’s probably been sixty years since I took this photograph of the old railway sheds beside North Bridge in Halifax, and a lot has happened since then. The sheds have gone, replaced by a leisure centre that has since disappeared as well. ....

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.... He no doubt studied there while learning his trade as an iron turner. The card is from David Beanland, who, despite the salutation, was Fowler’s nephew rather than his brother.

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

This week’s postcard comes from the collection of my great-uncle, Fowler Beanland. It shows the Mechanics’ Institute in Keighley, a building with which he would have been very familiar. It was built in 1853, a few years before he was born, and burnt down in 1962, a couple of years after he died.

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Artificial intelligence can manipulate images in wonderful ways, transforming corporate headquarters into Dalí-esque fantasies and Victorian piles into Gaudí-esque dreams. However, you don’t need AI when a plate-glass office block can provide its own reflections on Bradford.

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This is another of my “little flakes of history”: a negative from the 1920s depicting an unknown trio who have clearly found something of great significance in the bushes. “Look at this,” they seem to be saying from a century ago. “Look at what?” we reply. So far, no answer has emerged.

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

..... This particular flake dates back to around 1980 and was taken somewhere in Sheffield - please forgive me if I can’t remember exactly where.

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

At the start of a new month, I once again dive into my file of photographs taken over the last sixty or more years. Photographs make time stand still, and I see these pictures as little flakes of history. ....

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Now I go cleaning windows to earn an honest bob / For a nosy parker it's an interestin' job / Now it's a job that just suits me / A window cleaner you would be / If you can see what I can see / When I'm cleanin' windows.

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I took this photograph of the Royal Albert Docks in Liverpool yesterday while my wife was browsing a local gift shop. I sent it to my friend Jane, who suggested I use it for today’s calendar. The sky really was this blue, and the reflections really were this vibrant. It’s a grand place, Liverpool.

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

..... Built at a cost of £8 million, it was the world’s longest road tunnel for the first fourteen years of its existence. A masterpiece of twentieth-century civil engineering, it will hopefully get me safely to the other side.

Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Another way to cross the River Mersey is the method I’ll be using later today: travelling through the Mersey Tunnel. The Queensway Tunnel - the one I’ll be using - was constructed in 1934, the year before this fine old picture postcard was sent. .....

Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

.... For now, we will have to be satisfied with this memory from all those years ago, captured during our “Ferry Across the Mersey.”

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Later this weekend, I will be crossing the River Mersey. To celebrate, here is a photograph taken during a trip across the river more than seventy years ago. Later this year, I hope to make a slightly longer water crossing to be reunited with my brother. ....

Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I eventually narrowed it down to a building on Westfield Terrace in Sheffield, which has had a colourful history: it has served as a chapel, part of the old Royal Hospital, offices and, more recently, apartments. Fine buildings should have many uses; it is good to see them adapted over time.

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Coming across this old photograph - which I must have taken forty or more years ago - I was initially unsure of the exact location, as most northern towns and cities had a Mount Zion Chapel. .....

Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

.... It dates from a time when municipal pride was competitive, and local towns tried to outdo one another in the scale and beauty of their public buildings. For a town of its size, Dewsbury would take a lot of outdoing!

Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The third element of my Dewsbury triptych is the rather beautiful Dewsbury Town Hall, built in 1886 by local architects Henry Hottom and George A. Fox. ....

Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

.... Your companions look at you as though you’ve taken leave of whatever sense you had - but you have spotted a top market and some mannequin bottoms.

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The second of my Dewsbury triptych celebrates that moment - which all photographers know well - when you suddenly catch sight of an alignment of objects or an idiosyncratic collection of shapes, and snap away with enthusiastic abandon. ....

... Two depicted themselves - upper right and lower left - while the others portrayed the then Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli (upper left), and Richard Cobden, the former radical Liberal MP for the West Riding. I stopped to say hello to all four while walking around Dewsbury last week.

When brothers Robert and William Machell built their new mill in Dewsbury in 1874, they chose to incorporate four finely carved stone portraits into the fabric of the handsome Cloth Hall Mill. ....

.... Add a decent collection of chimney pots to the scene, and you almost have a work of sculpture.

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I remember taking this photograph half a century or more ago, at a time when there was an outcry against TV aerials as despoilers of urban landscapes. I was always rather fond of them - there was an idiosyncrasy about them that is sadly lacking in their modern equivalents. ....

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.... The message reads, “Methinks remark requires reversing.” Make of that what you will.

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Is there anything better than an old picture postcard - with a dramatic scene of waves breaking over the Blackpool seashore on one side and a cryptic message on the other The card appears to have been sent by my grandfather, Albert Beanland, to his brother, Fowler Beanland. ...

.... The organisation later became the Home Guard, and he was tasked with defending Baildon Bridge, near Bradford, in case the Germans sailed up the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler?

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At the outbreak of World War II, my father (on the left in the photograph), who was in a reserved occupation, joined the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV). He always claimed that LDV stood for “look, duck and vanish”. ...

... I took the photograph more than half a century ago, and more than half a world away.

Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

A cobbled street of almost mountainous proportions, gas lamps casting light over a greyscale scene, and washing lines stretching from side to side like cut-price bunting: this was Claremount, Halifax, in the late 1960s. ....

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.... I took this photograph at Bradford Industrial Museum. The machines stood still and silent, but history roared through the building.

Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I've only ever worked in a mill as a holiday job while at university - really, I was just playing at it. But I am the son, grandson, and great-grandson of mill workers. Threads of yarn bind my genes together, and bobbins form the bones of my ancestry. ....

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

.... I spent many an unhappy hour dowelling a dovetail joint (or whatever it was) and creating a footstool that eventually collapsed the first time anyone sat on it. Ah, woodwork!

Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I'm not quite sure how I acquired this photograph. I don't appear in it, and it isn't my school. None of that matters, however: the scene rings more bells than a school clock. ....

Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

There is a pleasure in collecting old photographs of unknown people. They are people who long ago departed this world, leaving behind only a few fading family memories and the occasional faded photograph. We get to shine a light on these forgotten faces and imagine what might have been.

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I must have taken this photograph almost sixty years ago. It’s grainy, low in contrast, tired, and of dubious quality. I asked AI to improve it, and it produced a version that was shiny, sharp, and so, so wrong. This is the Halifax I remember. Perhaps I, too, am grainy, tired, and of dubious quality

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

... Most interesting of all, however, is the fact that a postcard sent in the morning could be delivered the very same day!

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Alan Burnett @abfixby.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

“Sorry I could not see you this morning” was the brief message from FW to Mr S. Mellor of Leeds in July 1903. The choice of picture postcard is an interesting one: not only does it depict a fine Victorian building, but it also happens to be my old school. ...

.... Even the most powerful AI systems available can only suggest that they are “likely to be members of a women’s society or club.” Yet that is the beauty of old photographs: they pose questions but rarely provide answers.

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I have no idea who this group of women is or why so many of them are dressed in a similar style. You can speculate to your heart’s content and still probably come nowhere near a convincing answer. ....

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.... I first discovered it more than 50 years ago, and I still visit every time I am in the capital.

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Just one of the many decorative plaques found outside the truly magnificent Black Friar pub on Queen Victoria Street in London. The decorations inside are even more spectacular, making the pub an essential stop for any visitor to London. ....