Factory window

Grated
London, ON
July 2025
This photo originally shared on Instagram

Looking out the window of a century-old factory, it’s easy to think we’re seeing a simple collection of old buildings.

Yet whenever I visit places like this, I don’t see the architecture as much as the now-vanished communities that used to rely on these places. The workers who filed in shift after shift and worked in often brutal conditions to provide for their families. The surrounding neighbourhoods whose livelihoods and futures depended on these iron-and-brick giants that painted the surrounding skies with shadows and smoke.

Buildings like these became anchors, imperfect pillars of imperfect towns where everyday people just tried to get by. It was never supposed to be easy or comfortable or even fair.

And as industrialization gives way to an economy more driven by data than physical labour, the structural monoliths that once defined our cities are slowly disappearing. Along with them, their stories similarly fade from our memories.

So for the few hulks that remain, we pause by their oversized windows and wonder about lives now vanished, and the sacrifices others made in the pursuit of better tomorrows.

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