24th January 1974
Re-development Reveals History

It is a cold, wet January afternoon as I drop the cameras into the car and sit behind the wheel. It is parked by the Buttercross and I have just returned to it after paying a visit to a demolition site. A year ago Blackburn’s shop was demolished to make way for half of the new Boot’s [chemist’s] building. Now the building as housed Boot’s for as long as I can remember is on its way down. It looks no older than 18th century: but knowing Pontefract. I have my suspicions - hence the 4.30 p.m. visit. The demolition foreman is as helpful as he was last year. Wes, there is a stone-built wall right at the back and I can borrow a light to go and have a look. It doesn't look particularly old, but in that light who can tell? The flash brings into brief prominence and it lapses into darkness once more. Returning through the deserted shop I notice that the walls have been stripped of plaster. One spot looks different. A stone-built doorframe with an ancient wooden lintel, still in place, demonstrates that the 18th century builders took advantage of existing work to save themselves bricks and time.

It looks like the inside of the door and could prove that at one time the side of Boots nearest to Ropergate had no abutting building. But the stonework is a fair old age and must have been there at least 200 or even 300 years before the present Boots was erected. A quick picture records the details before they are destroyed and I cross the road to the car. The current spate of demolition has gone on for about a year now, the trouble is for the essential need for historians to obtain evidence of the age of the buildings, which may have been, and probably were, modernised every half century. This evidence can most conveniently be obtained with a camera during demolition. But in January, even finishing work at 4.p.m. there just isn’t enough light to photograph large areas. Frequent visits are necessary, when small details can be recorded using flash. Large areas can be photographed [one hopes] at weekends. Nothing can be left to chance, as this is the final opportunity.

A camera with black and white for the permanent record, one with colour film for detail and lecture illustration, a back up camera in case of breakdown. or for infra-red film in the unlikely event of wall paintings being found [as in the case of Bratley’s old premises in 1967] Finally three flash guns - two ordinary and one to take bulbs for its higher output.

In the warmth of the car I think back. Just a year ago I was doing the same thing a few yards away. We had known that the building used by Blackburns’s was at least 300 years old; but architectural detail revealed by demolition added another century. More pictures; more filthy clothes for a long-suffering wife to wash. Summer, and with its demise of Great Northern House. A mediocre example of 18th century architecture turns out to be a brick case on a 16th or 17th century town house.

Lots of light this time and a good record is obtained. Soon autumn is with us again, bringing shorter days. Near the Buttercross another 18th century building proves a thinly-disguised medieval house. Next to it is a much modified timber framed shop. Beautiful cellars with ovens; or are they soft-water storage tanks? Are we mad, the few of us who regularly do this, and are we filling a genuine historical need? The future will justify us. What would we not give now for such a record made in the last century?

Meanwhile, if you see a grimy figure, draped with cameras emerging from some demolition rubble, think of the cost of blocked washing machines and expended films... the rewards are certainly not in this life, but the social historians of the next century will have a lot more to go on than those of this.

We cannot keep every old building and most of us wouldn't want to. Film is cheap, however, and techniques easily learned. My own tally for the year is about 100 slides and negatives. Others have more. The permanent record is more important than arguments [usually fruitless] about preservation. Of course, the real heroes are the wives who tolerate this madness, after all, it’s not even seasonal, like football or cricket; they have no respite. So perhaps I can end by acknowledging the debt that local historians of the future will owe to Joan Battye, Margaret Lodge, and Joan Houlder.

Eric Houlder

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