The Cone

A close up shot of the iconic Wordsley Cone which dominates the skyline of the area. Today's MonoMonday theme is 'grunge' and being in the Black Country with it's rich history of industry and manufacturing, you don't have to look too far to find a bit of good old fashioned grunge.

Being a musician, and having also been a student in the 90s of course one might think that I might have gone for the musical interpretation of 'grunge'. But, Seattle is a long way from here, and the cone is literally round the corner, so, considering I had to take the picture and get back in time to pick the kids up from school, I figured this would be easier.

Nowadays the cone is pretty clean, but of course it is actually just a huge brick chimney, and with all the glasswork that used to happen inside, (and still does to a very limited extent), you can imagine the grunge and gunk that would have built up inside, and thusly you can imagine why this image is so iconic to the Black Country area and it's folklore.

I've always loved the fact that certain plants, defying all the odds, somehow find a way to seed, root and grow on this thing. If you look closely you can see a few at the top of the structure. Every so often a team of professional plant rescuers have to scale this thing and remove them so that the roots don't do too much structural damage to the building. Significantly though, they don't just discard the plants, they are re-homed, in some sort of statement of deference to the fact they managed to get an existence going up there.

I guess, in the words of the great chaos mathematician Ian Malcolm- "Life finds a way." 

Many thanks again to chantler63, and B4YUU  for hosting the MonoMonday theme this month.

C