A postcard of Stockton Marketplace showing the south side of the Town Hall, the Market Cross and the entrance to Finkle Street. The clock on the Town Hall shows the time at 8.25pm c1905.
Image and details courtesy of Peter Rigg.
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
Thanks Peter for another example of this type of work.
(http://picturestocktonarchive.wordpress.com/2002/06/15/stockton-high-street-in-darkness/)
It certainly looks like there is a certain amount of artistic licence at play here.
The illuminated windows, their contents and the shadowy figures look a little too good to be true.
This postcard formed part of the “D.F.& Co.” Series published by Delittle, Fenwick & Co, a York printing and publishing firm. The series contains pictures from many parts of the country, at least some of which show the moon in the north including at total of at least four depicting Stockton. Apparently the photographs were taken in daylight and doctored to darken the main image. The moon, clouds and, I guess, the bright lights in the windows were painted on at some stage in the process of preparing printing plates from the negatives.
One of the other similar images of Stockton, titled “High Street”, is already on this site and can be found by searching for “darkness”. A copy of a third showing the riverside is with Picture Stockton, a publication date has been set for next week.
STOCKTON MARKET: A firm supplied the paraffin lamps to stallholders for I think 5/- a day. They put them up and took them down for this sum. They had gas-mantles and the fumes from them smelt, if you spent too long near one you felt sick. I knew all the Stockton Council stall erection crew who put up the stall’s, they were erected Tuesday and Friday evenings, and taken down Wednesday and Saturday nights. I can remember the first aluminium stalls when they arrived, this would be around 1950, prior to that stallholders used their own improvised stalls. Around this time the market was modernised, the dwarf walls and steel fencing went up, and the ‘posh toilets’ were built. On the toilet corner they had three red telephone boxes facing the ‘Shambles main doorway.
Please spare a quiet thought for those stall holders who had travelled miles to get there, many from Leeds 62 miles away, and who braved the winter cold, winds and rain in order to ‘protect their market stall pitch’ from being given to someone else because they had not attended the market during the winter.
Not only the sky looks odd, but the lighted windows look too uniform. It is unlikely that all upstairs windows would be lighted with such intensity.
What I loved about the market after dark was that the lamps that were used to light the stalls were warm, and it was really comforting to stand by them on cold evenings.
H’mmm – if we are looking at the south side of the Town Hall, what is the bright object in the sky? It can’t /possibly/ be the moon – high up in the sky on the north side of north-east. I suspect that the night-time aspect of this picture was created in the darkroom.
I think that this night scene had the sky added from another photo. I cannot believe that the moon would ever appear so high in the northern sky, can any astronomers confirm this?
I would say that it is a harvest moon, similar to what we’ve been seeing in the past few nights.