Hatton Grange

Two years ago I showed you a crane over The Unity.

In March 2009 I showed you the view across the Croft Millennium Green towards Onward Street and Hatton Grange which was then nearing completion.

The new residential care home built on the site of the old Hyde Police Station was opened in Autumn 2009.

This is the view from Oldham Street along Onward Street.

Union Street Clinic

Union Street Clinic is run by the Tameside & Glossop Primary Health Care Trust.

Services that are accessed here include Dentistry and Pediatrics.

Bowlacre Home

Bowlacre is a residental care home off Stockport Road in Gee Cross.

The home's own website states

We are an Industrial and Provident society managed by a voluntary committee for the benefit of the old people of Hyde and have been established for over 50 years. We have a staff team that is committed to looking after our residents, supported by the committee & friends & relatives of both present & past residents. We also have 12 properties in the grounds which are rented to people who are able to look after themselves; these are for people who live within 5 miles of Bowlacre and are over 65 years old.

Foreign readers of this blog are (not surprisingly) very confused about the difference between three very different types of property

1. Retirement homes
2. Residential care homes
3. Nursing homes

In a future post I may try and elaborate the essential differences but not today.

Dr & Herbs

About five or six years ago Beijing Herbs opened a shop in Clarendon Mall.

A few years later it became part of the Dr & Herbs chain.

Since some months ago it appears to have ceased trading, but strangely the doors haven't been shuttered as usually happens when firms move out of one of the units.

According to this annoucement [dead link deleted]

The ownership has transferred from Dr&HERBS Ltd (in Liquidation) to YAWYE Ltd effective as of 26th February 2010 (YAWYE stands for You Are What You Eat).

I've not been able to garner any further information about what is happening here.

Is it a Flowertub or ...?

You tell me.

It is only a few yards from my post of February 20th.

Hospital Petitioners

Liz Degnen and her followers were in Hyde on Saturday collecting signatures for her petition that calls for the sacking of the management at Tameside Hospital.

You can read a report about her petition on the Tameside Advertiser.

According to their website Truth About Tameside Hospital [dead link deleted], they collected over 1000 signatures.

Whilst many people have received excellent treatment at and from the hospital, a lot of folk are seriously disatisfied with a number of failings. I'm not taking sides.

The hospital will feature on the BBC Panorama Programme at 8.30pm tonight.

New Bins for Smokers

Now that smokers have been driven out of the pubs and into the streets, these new bins have appeared recently in the Market Place.

This one has been attached to a bollard. There is even one on the side of the old tram shelter which appeared in my recent post Market Place.

Smokers can be fined £50 (or is it £80 now?) for dropping fag ends on the pavement. Will the presence of these bins result in cleaner streets? We shall see.

For a wider view of the location of this bin, see Hyde DP Xtra.

Entrance to Hyde Hospital

Just lower down Grange Road South from Dale Grove School is Hyde Hospital.

It no longer functions as a fully-fledged hospital. Much of it now consists of sheltered housing although there are also a number of ancillary health units on the site.

Rowan House which can be seen here is used by the Child Development Unit.

The Shepherds Call

The Shepherds Call on the corner of Market Street and Tower Street is by all accounts a traditional workers' pub with a regular clientelle.

Behind it on Tower Street is the side of the Thornley Medical Centre.

What's Big in Hyde?

The CDPB theme today is Big. When I asked my friends "What's Big in Hyde?" quite a lot of people came up with the boxer Ricky Hatton.

Last Wednesday Mohammed Ali (aka Cassius Clay) visited Ricky at his gym in Hyde.

Lots of media people were there beaming their stories about the meeting around the world. I just photographed the photographers.

Check out the video reports on BBC news and on BBC Sport.

To find out what is Big around the world Click here to view thumbnails for all participants.

Old House on Church Street

Now three separate residences, this old house on Church Street was originally a large family home and a doctor's surgery.

It looks slightly lop-sided as the left hand portion of the property was destroyed by a bomb in WWII and subsequently demolished.

The space was occupied by a garage at one time but now a modern house has been erected there.

In the 1980s and 90s it was home to the Church Street dental practice but that has since relocated to Borough Arcade.

I took this photograph after being contacted by Yvonne Michelle whose great grandparents and great-great grandparents once owned the house. She sent me a photograph of the house as it was in about 1910. You can see that and read more details about its history on Old Hyde.

Hatton Health and Fitness

The old NTA printworks on the corner of Market Street and Queen Street has now been converted into a gymnasium.

Brainchild of boxer Ricky Hatton, a few more finishing touches have been added to the building since this photograph was taken.

A membership recruitment drive has been going on in Clarendon Mall for the last few weeks and the club was officially opened on Monday.

Personally I'm not a fan of boxing, but if you are, you'll find his official website here.

Laurel Bank

Built in 1889 as Enfield Street School, this building on the corner of Knott Lane is now a residential care home.

Some weeks ago I showed you a slightly more distant view.

Croft Millennium Green #2 of 4

Looking towards the junction of Henry Street and Onward Street.

On the left is the rear of the Theatre Royal whilst ahead is a new residential nursing home, built on the site of the old Police Station.

Skywatch Friday: Hatton's Dream

The old printworks on Queen Street is set to open in the new year as the Hatton Health and Leisure Gymnasium.

The Gymnasium is the brain-child of champion boxer Ricky Hatton.

Discover more watchers of the heavens at Skywatch Friday.

Bus Station Roof

Two for the price of one today.

This picture, taken with my point-and-shoot Olympus, shows the projecting out roof of Hyde Bus Station. By shooting towards the sun, however, whilst it creates a satisfyingly austere image, all detail is lost.


This is the same image after "equalising the histogram". Although this creates a rather flat appearance it does bring out the details. In the background is the Donnybrook Medical Centre and the rear of the parade of shops at the bottom of Market Street.

Breast Cancer Awareness

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Back in March I featured a charity stall in aid of Breast Cancer Care.

Yesterday, a local charity, The Genesis Appeal based at Wythenshawe Hospital, had a stall in Clarendon Shopping Centre. My wife made a donation and got a badge which the lady (on the right in the picture) duly pinned on my wife's cap.

No Smoking in Four Languages

This set of No Smoking signs are from inside the market hall within Clarendon Shopping Centre.

So far as I can tell they are in Greek, Arabic, Polish and Chinese. I wonder why these specific languages were chosen. I would have thought the most likely candidates would have been Urdu, Bengali and Gujurati.

Post-smoking ban picture worth £2,500

Following the ban on smoking in public buildings, this is now the scene outside in the street. I won't name the particular pub as it is much the same all over town.

Now, wait a minute; hasn't there also been a recent crackdown on litter in the street? Didn't someone get fined £50 for a single dropped matchstick?

By my reckoning there must be £2,500 worth of litter in this photo alone!

Red Roofs and Colour Blindness

Today's picture shows workmen busy putting a new roof on one of the blocks of flats on Back Bower Lane. To me the roof tiles look red and the building is constructed with red bricks and I was going to post this on the 1st for the Red Theme Day. Told by my good wife that the subject matter really isn't red, I took another picture for the theme post.

When I mentioned about my being colour-blind, some people obviously did not understand and thought I couldn't see colours at all. So to inform such people, here is what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:

Color blindness, (also known as Dyschromatopsia) or color vision deficiency, in humans is the inability to perceive differences between some or all colors that other people can distinguish.
The most frequent forms of human color blindness result from problems with either the middle or long wavelength sensitive cone systems, and involve difficulties in discriminating reds, yellows, and greens from one another. They are collectively referred to as "red-green color blindness", though the term is an over-simplification and somewhat misleading. Other forms of color blindness are much more rare. They include problems in discriminating blues from yellows, and the rarest forms of all, complete color blindness or monochromacy, where one cannot distinguish any color from grey, as in a black-and-white movie or photograph.

It goes on to highlight popular misconceptions:

Color blindness is not the swapping of colors in the observer's eyes. Grass is never red, and stop signs are never green. The color impaired do not learn to call red "green" and vice versa. However, dichromats often confuse red and green items. For example, they may find it difficult to distinguish a Braeburn from a Granny Smith and in some cases, the red and green of a traffic light without other clues (e.g., shape or location).
Color blindness almost never means complete monochromatism. In almost all cases, color blind people retain blue-yellow discrimination, and most color blind individuals are anomalous trichromats rather than complete dichromats. In practice this means that they often retain a limited discrimination along the red-green axis of color space although their ability to separate colors in this dimension is severely reduced.
It should also be noted that even though some people are unable to see some or maybe even any of the numbers in (e.g. red-green) color blindness test, the person might still be able to tell the difference between the colors in his or her everyday life.

Here is a page that might enlighten you on web design accessibility. I suspect that when I complain sometimes about not seeing text on a web page until I run my cursor over it and highlight the text, the designer doesn't understand what I'm getting at as they can see it perfectly clearly. The corollary to that is — I design my own web pages so that I can see text clearly against a particular background, but I don't know how that looks to folk who aren't colour-blind. Perhaps it looks garish to them. In fact I recall changing the background colour on some of my web pages at the request of someone who suggested the change would aid clarity.