Mining Your Craft For A Square Bee Dream

Today's image is another in my ongoing bus stop series. I again had to nip up to our local shops for some essential supplies, obviously still taking my camera with me, when I glanced through some sprayed on graffiti on the glass of the nearby bus alightment portal and saw this depiction of a quadrilateral shaped hymenoptera for a film and fast food promotional mash up (I think you'll be able to guess both the film and the processed foodstuff provider) and it just seemed to have a dream-like quality to it. Doesn't everyone occasionally dream of square bees? O.K maybe only me then ! :-)

I came across a fascinating article in a newspaper today that opines that Shrewsbury invented the skyscraper.
For 250 years the redoubtable Shrewsbury Chronicle has published all the news that's fit to print about this ancient Shropshire town but the article writer wondered whether it had ever carried a more prescient announcement than that which it did on the 1st September 1797, when it noted "a very important improvement" incorporated into a new "manufactory" in the area.
John Mitchell, an ambitious textile manufacturer, had opened a huge new flax mill spinning yarn for linen. Such mills were notoriously vulnerable to fire. To reduce the risk the architect Charles Bage developed an idea, pioneered by engineer William Strutt, of using iron frames instead of timber. The new Shrewsbury mill became the world's first building with a complete iron frame.
This would go on to have remarkable consequences. Although it wasn't their intention, those ingenious 18th Century engineers had invented a method of construction that allowed buildings to rise up 20, 50, 100 (and now in places such as Dubai ,163 storeys). The Shrewsbury Flaxmill was indeed the "grandfather of the skyscraper" - a cast-iron skeleton that went on to conquer the world!
It is only by chance that the mill has survived to the present day and it could have even been demolished in the 1860's, when it ceased operating as a mill. Luckily it was sold to a malt manufacturer who saw the potential to turn barley into malt on an industrial scale. Over the subsequent century thousands of pub landlords must have pulled billions of pints from malt produced there. The only interruption came during the Second World War, when the army requisitioned it as a barracks  - but it proved to be very unpopular with those billeted there, who described it in extremely disparaging terms as a "rat hotel"!
When malt manufacturing ended at the site in 1987, and despite it being grade 1 listed as well as being recognised by historians as the forerunner of steel-framed skyscrapers, the mill fell into serious disrepair and began to crumble.
With dereliction imminent it was eventually bought by English Heritage in 2005 just to stop it falling down. However, this story does have a happy ending as over the last 20 years it has been helped by £20 million pounds of lottery money allowing it to undergo an impressive transformation and, just this month, open to the public.