English Containers take a long time to load - so here's something to read while the machine grinds on.

This is a series of photos I've taken over a long period of time.

There were 7 gas containers and 4 cooling towers within a 5 minute walk of the house I grew up in. I still keep taking photos of them regardless of how many I already have, or how mediocre the results.

My local landscape was dominated by the containers and all the ephemera that went with them - canals, processing plants, railway tracks, black brick huts ....

By the time I had my first camera, the factories had closed down, the chemical works abandoned and the painstaking process of removing the cooling towers brick by brick had begun.

I used to go and take photos of the structures with my Prinz 110 Sharpshooter. I liked the Prinz's denim pouch, and complimentary chain and medallion. It was only really the quality of the photographs that let the Prinz down.

The whole area emptied rapidly after the factory close-downs, and in the Summer holidays I'd wander through long afternoons rarely seeing anyone else. I'd climb through a fence and find another vast cement plane littered with repeated rusting metal offcuts and extruded shapes.

Now even the remnants of industry have gone and all those solitary routes and cut throughs have vanished. The power station was replaced by Star City and the cement plateaus and deserted factories were renamed Heartlands and cleared for sport centres and other regeneration projects.

But the containers are still there and I carry on taking the same photos.