Photos

My Home Town - 18

Loughborough's heavy engineering, hosiery and textile base has faded rapidly but the town has bounced back with vigour and unemployment is low - we are in such a central location on the MI, mainline trains and near to the East Midlands Airport between the three cities of Derby, Nottingham and Leicester. The consequence of the decline of our old industrial base is in the destruction or conversion of many old factories, the building of new sites for the research facilities of pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca and more smaller industrial units. The University, one of the largest campuses in the country, also continues to expand. It has a worldwide reputation for it's work in engineering, the arts, innovation and of course sports!

This photograph was taken after cheekily trying a door on this derelict factory complex which runs alongside the Grand Union Canal. It was open so I spent a happy ten minutes clicking away. This is perhaps my favourite one from that session.

I've called it Where Men Once Worked (I'm sure there were some women working here too) to highlight the changing base of work - more service industry development means that old industrial and largely male based skills from this type of factory are no longer needed. However in Loughborough many female production workers have had to re-skill from the hosiery and elastic making work too.

Note the yellow heavy duty gantry crane which tells you this was a more heavy industrial unit.