The End of an Era

When I was a little girl going to school I always had to walk past the Sketchley Factory. It was a collosal Victorian factory built in the hey day of the hosiery and textile industry, which was what the town of Hinckley was famous for. I was always a little scared walking past the facade of the building - I thought that the big dust extractor vents would fall down and squash me so I used to hurry past them as quickly as possible. The journey to school was rife with near fatal squashing incidents - looking back, as I used to hurry under the railway bridge too, especially if a train was going over, just in case that too would fall down and squash me flat. Hmmm.....

Well, anyway, Sketchleys was a massive textile dye works and later on dry cleaners (Sketchleys - we know the meaning of cleaning - remember?) and was a major local employer.

When I left Hinckley in 1982 to go to the bright lights (and University) of London it was still a major employer - but over the years as the hosiery factories gradually started to lose out to cheap imported clothes, the working part of Sketchleys became smaller and smaller and most of the factory was left empty.

I've just found a great link to how Sketchleys looked - http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=39712

Over the last five years when I came back to Hinckley, Sketchleys was practically deserted and about two years ago they even stopped trying to do basic repairs like guttering and so on. Thieves had stripped a lot of lead from the roofs and it was starting to look a mess.

A few weeks ago I noticed that you could see daylight though the windows of the factory. They had been demolishing the building from behind for literally weeks. Only the Victorian brick facade remained and about a week or so ago even that finally went. Just look at it now:

Unbelieveable isn't it? The huge chimneys are still up but they're due to go in the next couple of days - I don't know what they are planning for the boiler house, but it'll be gone soon, I would think.

I think they're strange - the people of this town. They're not like the coal miners or the ship builders - no one went around beating their chests moaning about how their jobs were being taken away. They just quietly got laid off, retired, or found other things to do and industry just slid away here, without even a murmur and the amount of industry lost here in the midlands - if you include the motor industry - was far in away higher than the miners or the steel workers and possibly even the ship builders. So, it's not surprising then, that I'm the only one taking pictures of this end of an era. No one else bothers - it's just another factory. They're more interested to see if a new Tesco is about to spring up. God help us all.