Along side the broken glass and peeling paint the essential ingredient for any successful urban decay photo shoot has to be metal. Twisted, rusted or hanging from rotten roves there is metal everywhere on the Hilden Mill site but it isn’t interesting, you have to hunt for the good stuff and more often than not the attractive stuff is under foot!
With over 200 years of history trod into the ground around the mill you wonder just what they will discover when the builders move in. As you can see below future finds are already making their way to the soil.
Barbour threads was definitely a pre-computer age factory with the highest tech hardware I found being an electronic clocking in and out machine (link) still gracing the wall. No multi-touch screens this was the traditional route (as we call it here).
It was strange to see punch cards still neatly in the rack, in fact a good horror writer would add this mysterious cardigan (link) and the unnerving fact five workers never clocked out to their creative advantage.
The number of industrial age gauges and gears that still remain on site was amazing. I discovered a rack of around thirty different sized gear wheels in one dark corner of the site.
Sadly the only photo I took was out of focus but I did find one gear that appears sharp, the rack will be well gone by this stage or I would have returned.
I could have spent a full day photographing the different gears and spools that lay scattered on the ground around the site but perhaps if you have seen one gear wheel you have seen them all.
A very interesting place to visit by the look of the pictures,
some nice work there.