What I’m thinking about while I’m actually making things.
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All Writing / Clear filterExplore Industrial History in LearnYou could mistake Newquay’s Huer’s Hut for something built to improve a postcard. A little white building on the headland. The sea behind it. Just enough character to make you point a camera at it.
Most of us, faced with an awkward delivery, complain about the delivery company. Joseph Thomas Treffry’s approach was rather more expensive. He became involved in mines, harbours, waterways and tramways.
Before the Headland Hotel could sell anybody a peaceful sea view, there was a considerable argument about what should happen to the land underneath it. This was not a disagreement over the breakfast menu.
Meet the man behind Newquay’s unfinished harbour, follow the cargoes that made it worth attempting, and imagine the town that might have grown around it.
Gravel Hill’s ore had the Atlantic at its feet. Reaching a ship still meant going up a cliff, along a road and into somebody else’s working day.
The families who built ships, the merchant who fought the mud, and a working river with very little interest in anyone's timetable.
Behind the beach were people managing water, grinding grain and moving heavy loads. Follow their work through a landscape that kept changing jobs.
Ore from Newquay crossed the Gannel to be processed near Crantock. A forgotten works connects the town’s mines to the opposite bank.
The car-park name remembers a copper mine. A carpenter’s workshop, a chapel commission and changing mineral fortunes help put people back into the town around it.
A mine beneath a familiar view, children whose wages went straight home, and a hillside that kept finding new jobs after the digging stopped.
I grew up walking this coast with a surfboard. A Victorian railway and harbour scheme makes me wonder whether I might have caught the train instead—and what would have been waiting when I got there.
