On Smoke and Contrast.

This is a picture of the Manhattan skyline, taken, I should think, some time during my lifetime.

 

And this is a picture of the Stoke on Trent (my home town) skyline, painted, I’m fairly sure, a little before I was born. 

 

Not so very different really, are they?

I like to think that my home town skyline is better looking because it has more character. But then I would, not because it’s my home town but because I’m a little strange. And appreciation of character is as personal as appreciation of both beauty and humour.

And for those who don’t know, the bottle shaped structures are bottle kilns which were used for commercial pottery manufacture before the ceramics industry embraced electricity. Imagine what the air of Stoke on Trent must have felt and smelled like when row upon row of terraced houses occupied most of what space was left in the landscape, and burned standard house coal almost constantly between October and May.