McLeish's Vulcan Iron Works

A street of tall brick buildings with a balconied front at the left, and the roadway before it filled with the plant of a working yard: carriage bodies, wheels, sawhorses, a long boiler or tank lying on the ground. This is Archibald McLeish's Vulcan Iron Works and the houses along the street.

It is worth saying what this photograph nearly became. At thumbnail size the carriage bodies read as a motor car and their shafts as overhead wiring, and the plate was very nearly set aside as a twentieth-century street scene. At full size it is 1865 without question. Nothing in this collection is discarded before it has been opened.