For some history enthusiasts it might be an old story. The kind of kings and queens history taught immediately post-war was like a kind of standard fiction that everybody read but which offered few points of personal contact. I got as far as the Tudors but then, under the rules of the fifties, had to take physics because I was fractionally better at it. So the talk of friends about The Balkan Question and the Corn Law Question passed me by. Thank goodness for geography that I could relate to all around.
It was geography that opened up history for me, in fact. In my home town, a small Staffordshire market-with-silkmills town called Leek, when I looked at geography I inevitably saw history. A good friend was in to medieval church history because of interesting ruins nearby. My place was not ruins, though. It was a living, rattling, sort of place full of people, the sight of smoky chimneys and the smells of oily machinery. It was here that the family worked, mostly in the mills, with one or two in white-collar jobs. It was easy to move from a childhood of train sets and Meccano construction kits to the discovery of mill engines, lorries loaded with goods for the shops and an awakening realisation that textile factories and terraced housing had been woven together according to some historical pattern.
I don't know exactly what it was that opened up an interest in industrial archaeology. I don't think it was the silk mills as such or the James Brindley Water Mill in the town - that was not restored in 1961 or 1962 which was roughly the time I'm remembering. It might have been knowledge of some of the sites in Stoke-on-Trent just a few miles away: potteries, canals, a steel works. Or a book on the industrial revolution from the local library. Or it might have been a further education tutor I happened to know who had his own interest in the subject. Whichever it was I began to read more and visit some of the places by bus or with a friend who had a car (sadly prone to frequent breakdowns). It was the geography that caught my imagination first, so I'm sure there was a strong transport-pattern element. Also, the fascination of machinery like the steam engine that used to drive all the silk-making equipment in the mill where members of my family worked. There must have been some sort of art or sculptural-appreciation side to this - wheels turning, connection-rods sliding to and fro, steam hissing in small clouds. Perhaps there was the boy-thing about power, in the sense of something which made movement and processes possible. Engineering was a way of solving problems and making things work - very utilitarian but often in a visually attractive or intriguing kind of way.
If you had said I was becoming caught by the history bug you would have been right, as I read up on the people who made the industrial revolution and the people who were drawn in to the new worlds that it offered. Especially amongst my family and their earlier generations, who moved in the area from farm to smithy to millwrighting in three generations.
If you had come up with the word 'heritage' I would have thought it an idea that seemed a bit airy-fairy.
At least then.
It was geography that opened up history for me, in fact. In my home town, a small Staffordshire market-with-silkmills town called Leek, when I looked at geography I inevitably saw history. A good friend was in to medieval church history because of interesting ruins nearby. My place was not ruins, though. It was a living, rattling, sort of place full of people, the sight of smoky chimneys and the smells of oily machinery. It was here that the family worked, mostly in the mills, with one or two in white-collar jobs. It was easy to move from a childhood of train sets and Meccano construction kits to the discovery of mill engines, lorries loaded with goods for the shops and an awakening realisation that textile factories and terraced housing had been woven together according to some historical pattern.
I don't know exactly what it was that opened up an interest in industrial archaeology. I don't think it was the silk mills as such or the James Brindley Water Mill in the town - that was not restored in 1961 or 1962 which was roughly the time I'm remembering. It might have been knowledge of some of the sites in Stoke-on-Trent just a few miles away: potteries, canals, a steel works. Or a book on the industrial revolution from the local library. Or it might have been a further education tutor I happened to know who had his own interest in the subject. Whichever it was I began to read more and visit some of the places by bus or with a friend who had a car (sadly prone to frequent breakdowns). It was the geography that caught my imagination first, so I'm sure there was a strong transport-pattern element. Also, the fascination of machinery like the steam engine that used to drive all the silk-making equipment in the mill where members of my family worked. There must have been some sort of art or sculptural-appreciation side to this - wheels turning, connection-rods sliding to and fro, steam hissing in small clouds. Perhaps there was the boy-thing about power, in the sense of something which made movement and processes possible. Engineering was a way of solving problems and making things work - very utilitarian but often in a visually attractive or intriguing kind of way.
If you had said I was becoming caught by the history bug you would have been right, as I read up on the people who made the industrial revolution and the people who were drawn in to the new worlds that it offered. Especially amongst my family and their earlier generations, who moved in the area from farm to smithy to millwrighting in three generations.
If you had come up with the word 'heritage' I would have thought it an idea that seemed a bit airy-fairy.
At least then.
