10 Membranes

The chimney of the India Mill in Darwen, near Blackburn in Lancashire. At the time of construction in the 1850s it was the largest and most expensive mill chimney in the country, towering, as it still does, over the local area. What impresses me about this structure is not only its bizarre gigantism, madly out of proportion to the mill itself and the town, but the care and curiosity in the design, and moreover the brash Victorian self confidence of the whole thing. This is the engineering, design and organisational bombast of a superpower.