Wednesday Walk: Thornton Factory Club & Outpatient Clinic

Greetings friends, we are having gloomy weather, quite wintry. It is gloomy and cold outside, and sometimes it starts to snow. Usually this weather happens in January in our city, but this time winter came very early, not even waiting for the end of the last autumn month. I went out for walks anyway, regardless of the weather conditions, but the pictures over the last few days are gloomy and dreary - so I decided to tell you today about a walk I took a little bit earlier, about two weeks ago.

This is a walk with continuations. The days get very short in the fall, and it gets dark so early that I didn't have time to see everything I had planned in one day. I had to return to the same spot the next sunny day to pick up where I left off on the first walk. Of course, I can't cover everything I encountered in two days in one post... so I'll have to write a sequel later - about the wooden manor house, the water tower, and the residential worker's town built in the 1920s.

I started my walk on the Neva River embankment. This place not so long ago was a distant city outskirts. Industrial plants alternated with vacant lots overgrown with weeds. Now a new residential neighborhood is being constructed here. A new bridge across the Neva is going to be built nearby in a few years, and it will significantly improve the transport accessibility of the neighborhood. Once upon a time, in my early youth, my friend and I rented a small apartment nearby (the area was far from the city center, so it was cheap), and I remember how desolate this embankment was. The view of the area was completely transformed, and it was hard for me to get my bearings.

I wanted to get to Telman Street to see some of the old buildings (I posted pictures of some of those buildings at the beginning of the post). The road that led to the street from the embankment seemed too muddy, so I decided to walk along the new buildings first and then turn off in the right direction.

This decision was a mistake. It turned out that it was impossible to walk through the yards of the new buildings, and I had to make a rather long detour. As a result, I got to know the outskirts of the construction site much more intimately than I had planned. I visited some interesting nooks and crannies that I wouldn't have seen otherwise. But my shoes were in dire need of cleaning after this walk.

I was walking down a street between two blocks under construction, and it was a really tough place to walk. The construction equipment had brought this street to a very bad condition. At first I was able to find walking paths, but at the end I found myself right in front of a huge puddle. Around the edges of this puddle were mountains of construction debris. There had probably been stalls or temporary outbuildings, and the structures had been dismantled, but the garbage had not yet been removed.

Just across the street, on the opposite bank of the puddle, I saw one of the buildings I had taken this walk for. I didn't know if there was a more accessible way to get to the right house, so I carefully walked around the edge of the puddle. This house was built in the 1910s, just before World War I broke out. It housed the Thornton factory's handyman's club. Thornton's factory was quite a large enterprise, the brick buildings of the factory will be seen in some of the photos. The factory produced cloth and wool products.

Club for workers is located on the outskirts of a small workers' town. At the beginning of the twentieth century, several brick apartment buildings for workers, a wooden manor house for the factory manager, a policlinic, a school and a kindergarten were erected near the factory. The school building did not survive, but the rest of the houses are still intact.

The most unusual building in this working village is the clinic. It looks a bit like an English cottage. There are very few buildings in this style in our city. The building has not changed much since it was built, but some decorations were added during the Soviet era. For a long time, the factory outpatient clinic continued to be located here.

I was going to see a few more buildings in this workers' town, but I didn't have time to continue my walk. The Neva embankment was illuminated by the setting sun, but dusk was already thickening in the back of the block. It was not an easy choice: to walk to the manager's house deep in the block or to the factory building on the embankment. I decided it wasn't a healthy idea to wander in the semi-darkness, so I went toward the factory.

The factory building is almost ruined now, the factory was very badly damaged in a fire in 2021. Behind the blank fence you could see a tall brick wall with empty rectangles of windows.