A few more of 1960s newspaper reproductions of works by local artist Harold Blackburn (1899-1980) have been added to the site: huddersfield.exposed/archive/tag/...

The Queensgate market "conversion" is looking fantastic. This is how the roof should have always been displayed - instead of being hidden behind nondescript shops (externally) and crowded stalls (internally). #Huddersfield #Brutalism

Now that's brutalism!

Can't we all just turn the lights off and pretend that we're not home?

The late George Redmonds had this to say about "Ponker"

Aside from the complicated boundaries, I love the name ‘Ponker Nook Lane’. 😊

Seriously tho, getting hold of volumes one to three is child's play. Finding a copy of the rare volume four -- a hefty collection of maps -- is the Holy Grail (£1 coin for scale). I had to make do with a fairly tatty one.

I'm sure I've mentioned this one before, but the Cumberworth area was a patchwork of land owned by four different township/parishes. Rate collectors struggled to know which houses were under their remit and it ended up with houses using different coloured house numbers to denote the township 😁

@beckybowd.bsky.social Just posted on Teams, but I've had to take the HQ site offline as it's being DDoS'd by a company in Singapore.

As a follow up to the post about Robert Ellis Davies, the other name on the Meltham war memorial which had eluded me was Joseph Bailey. This has turned out to be a railway platelayer who was born and lived in Thurlstone and possibly never set foot in Meltham. www.cwgc.org/find-records...

Some local history research is easy to do whist other research is about as much fun as toothache 😁 The name "Robert E. Davies" on the war memorial at Meltham falls into the latter category and it's taken a few attempts to confidently identify which of the 8 men with that name who died in WW1 is it.

Another set of artistic contributions to the Huddersfield Examiner newspaper. This time, from the early 1960s, it's Huddersfield artist Harold Blackburn (1899-1980). The final image (Cliffe Ash Golcar) is now the Colne Valley Museum. huddersfield.exposed/archive/tag/...

That time in 1851 when the firemen from Honley were too drunk to help put out a fire in Meltham.

The gravestone of Mary Wood and siblings at Honley churchyard (full transcription in ALT). huddersfield.exposed/s/76956 flickr.com/photos/93416... "Young maidens all who pass this way, Read and reflect on what I say; Though I am dead, this stone's my tongue, To tell the world my grief and wrong..."

Surely if it's a "wrinkle cream" the photos should be the other way around?

Looks like the rumours weren't true.

Since it's International Dog Day, join me in saying "Who's a good boy? YOU'S a good boy!!" to Inspector Tom of the Huddersfield Borough Police Force. huddersfield.exposed/s/2497 huddersfield.exposed/s/10569

Honley in 1851.

I don't want to worry anyone, but it looks like the cranes are breeding.

I've added some stats to the tarpit data download page. Part of the reason for the recent increase is that I stopped blocking the whole of Brazil, who are still responsible for a huge amount of bad bot activity. huddersfield.exposed/files/tarpit...

I'm beginning to wonder if it's too popular? 😁 At the moment, it's handling an average of 16 requests per second from greedy bad bots (i.e. the ones pretending to be normal human users) and they're gobbling up gigabytes of plausible gibberish, all of which is hopefully poisoning AI company LLMs.

The tarpit is proving very popular with the bad bots 🙂 On the off-chance that someone wants to make use of the tarpit data or perhaps do some interesting analysis: huddersfield.exposed/files/tarpit...

Reposting for the morning crowd, as Law's sites contain a treasure trove of useful historical research. Based on his own statement, I'd suggest a Creative Commons licence of CC BY-NC 4.0 would be applicable to his research.

Sadly the websites of the late historian Edward J. Law have vanished thanks to eircom.net purging all their personal web hosting. I'll likely deposit a copy of the sites into the Internet Archive, but my backup from 2017 is now available here: edwardjlaw.huddersfield.click

Just two and a bit weeks to Chartism Day. Don’t forget to register… www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/chartism-d...

I had a day off work yesterday so decided to build myself a virtual infinite tar pit to see if I could tempt the AI bots to go play in there instead. At around 8:07am this morning, they took the bait and moved from the live site (which is a wiki) into the tar pit (which I've dubbed the "waka") 😁

Finished upgrading the web servers so might run off and play in the park for a bit 🤓🏃

The lower section of Beaumont Park sometime around 1900 (give or take a decade or two). A video created from a stereoscopic card: huddersfield.exposed/s/9071

He's right you know -- those chicken soup vending machine nozzles aren't going to clean themselves.

Analysing the VM requests has highlighted something useful (but worrying!). One of the "tells" of bad AI bots has been the random use of old user agent strings (see www.mythic-beasts.com/blog/2025/04...). That bot traffic from VM (and now also from elsewhere) has fixed that particular tell...

In "bad AI bot" news, something weird is going on with the Virgin Media domestic ISP network (AS5089). Looks like they've sold or leased subsets of their network to external companies (inc. some AI ones) and it's been by far the primary source of bad bot requests in the last 24 hours.

Just received a domain name scam email from China asking if I'm the CEO of Huddersfield. Tempted to reply "Yes".

Watching "Fake or Fortune?" and thinking it'd be a shorter programme if someone had looked at this book published in 1900. archive.org/details/ange...

Please note that this special offer ends 20 April 1979.

If you've got railway platelayer Charles Kershaw of Bradley (Huddersfield) in your family tree, then you'll be very pleased to hear that he got really drunk one Saturday night in November 1865, decided he was fed up of wearing clothes and walked home in his birthday suit.

It's also been suggested that honey is the reason for the place name "Meltham" due to the Latin for honey being "Mel". However, why would a remote location on the slopes of the Pennines have a Latin name? The answer likely lies in the Victorians' obsession with all things Roman...

Just answered a question on Facebook about Meltham's coat of arms. You'd think a coat of arms would be an ancient thing, but the current Meltham one dates from 1951. At the time, locals were unable to agree on what had been on the "lost" one.

🚨🚨NEW VIDEO!🚨🚨 Why is there an Egyptian Temple in the middle of Leeds? We explore the story of Temple Works - the most unique industrial building in Britain. youtu.be/KeM4R-lhk_M

If you know, you know.

Shout out to everyone else struggling to get from Leeds to Huddersfield. I think there's supposed to be 5 trains an hour but they all appear to be setting off at the same time with the slow stopping train going first 🤪 #WackyRaces

Surely it should be "Beyond ignites curiositynessificationalism"

Royd edge, West nab and Wessenden yesterday evening.

If anyone's interested in data that might help them block bad bots, just shout. For example, I've got details of just over 13,000 user agent strings that (to date) have only ever appeared in bot requests (just under 70,000 requests in total) and never by a human user.

Just received some email spam from an SEO company, so I thought I'd take a look at their website 😁 Tempted to reply using a Lorem Ipsum generator for the text

An occasional plug that I've been hosting WordPress sites for 20 years now and provide a managed hosting service -- updates, security, firewalls, backups, monitoring, etc are all taken care of for you. All the sites I'm currently hosting had 100% uptime over the last 12 months 🥂

I reckon we're now into around 6 months that I would have spent progressing current research projects that I've instead spent battling billion dollar company AI bots. I doubt I'm the only web server admin stuck in the same trench. huddersfield.exposed/wiki/Hudders...

If I have to explain to you why it's a bad idea to use a machine that makes shit up 15-80% of the time AND destroys the environment AND contributes to rising fascism and genocide AND puts brilliant skillful creatives out of work by stealing their work, then we're already speaking different languages

In a world of artificiality, embrace something real. Touch it. It's there. No greenscreen, no AI. By choosing to make something so obviously false - paint and pastels on a board - it's actually more real than the 'realistic' high tech. And that's why what we do is so different.

You can't beat Look North subtitles.

Ooof! Bloomin' bots! I'd previously only been filtering requests for the main textual content of the site but I'm now filtering access to multimedia stuff too, hence the huge uptick in blocked bad bots 🤖🔨 A never ending battle against billion dollar companies!! huddersfield.exposed/wiki/Hudders...