Allan recalls a blast from the past

Because this picture from Allan Potter of Telford captures the moment years ago a landmark industrial chimney was brought crashing down.

"It shows the chimney being felled at the Lilleshall Company steel rolling mill at Snedshill," says Allan.

But when was this event? Looking through our archives, we have a Shropshire Star picture showing one of the old Victorian chimneys at the Lilleshall Company site at Snedshill being toppled in October 1967, and at least one other of the redundant chimneys was blown up at the same time.

However, Allan thinks his picture is not of that occasion.

"I think it was well before that, based on the fact that I had been in the habit of using colour transparencies since the early 1960s and had a better camera.

"Also I joined the staff of the Lilleshall Co in early 1959, and I just have the feeling the demolition was just before or just after I started at the New Yard head office."

Allan, from Muxton, added: "The Star chimney demolition photo you have resurrected is certainly at the Lilleshall Co concrete department at Snedshill, where I was transferred to work in the department office in the early 1960s, but it shows a square-profiled structure as opposed to the round chimneys on my old photos.

"It may be that my photo is somewhere else completely, maybe Dark Lane, but I do have a distinct memory of standing at Snedshill and watching the demolition in front of the old steel rolling mill.

"But again 'anno domini' can play tricks on the mind."

Armed with Allan's memory, we have delved deeper, and can offer a couple of other candidate chimney blow-ups.

One is the occasion on October 23, 1960, when a giant 135ft high chimney stack at the Lilleshall Company's Priorslee Works was felled.

And on March 8, 1964, a chimney nearly 200ft high was demolished at the Lilleshall Co blast furnaces at Priorslee.