Column: Looking Back with Alan Burnett

It’s not that it isn’t photogenic - it has great lines and angles and the lighting conditions can be spectacular - it’s just that it was photographed so brilliantly 80 years ago by Bill Brandt and anything else pales into insignificance.

That’s why Brandt’s photographs of Dean Clough taken in the late 1930s are displayed in some of the finest art galleries in the world, and sensible modern photographers avoid the place.

I’ve never been particularly sensible and that is why I took countless photographs of the then run-down mill complex in the 1960s and 70s.

None of them remotely match the stunning images taken by Brandt 30 or so years earlier, but they, at least, illustrated another chapter in the on-going history of Dean Clough.

Dean Clough was just a small mill when first occupied by John Crossley at the very beginning of the nineteenth century.

However, over the course of the next 60 or 70 years, he and his three sons, John, Joseph and Francis, transformed it into a thriving industrial complex of over 20 acres, and the largest carpet manufacturing mill in Europe.

The Crossley’s were remarkably successful in applying steam power and mechanisation to the carpet making process.

They were also remarkably astute in licensing and selling their developments to the rest of the world.

By the 1960s and 1970s, when most of my photographs were taken, Dean Clough had fallen on hard times, Carpet manufacture at Dean Clough came to an end in 1982, and the vast site could easily have gone the way of so many others in the north of England - destruction, demolition and replacement by concrete warehouses and mindless car parks.

It was saved by the vision and determination of Sir Ernest Hall and Jonathan Silver, and turned into the mixed complex of offices, galleries, shops, restaurants and workshops that continue to this day.