TISH: Class, creativity, and inequality in British art

Kenn Taylor
Tish Murtha Portrait by Tish Murtha © Ella Murtha

By Kenn Taylor

In 2021, when we were all still reeling from the ongoing effects of the pandemic, a Kickstarter on social media caught my eye: a project to make a documentary about the life of photographer Tish Murtha, by director Paul Sng and Tish’s daughter Ella.

I knew of Murtha’s work through my deep interest in the photography of working-class communities and places. Yet, until I read the synopsis of the film, I’d not been fully aware of the scope of Murtha’s work, or the extent to which she was let down as an artist and a person by society.

After finally being able to view TISH in late 2023, these impressions have only been deepened by Sng’s powerful work, which is both a subtle, rich portrait of Murtha and hard-hitting in its moral and political message. While Murtha’s photography speaks for itself, Sng brings her life and the background to her pictures vividly into focus.

No moving image recording of Murtha exists, so her story is told through a mix of interviews with people who knew her and footage of Tish being played by Maxine Peake, whose voiceover readings of Murtha’s writing reveal it was almost as compelling as her photography.

In TISH, Murtha’s biography is brought to life in all its complexity. Born in 1956, Murtha grew up as the third of ten children in a family on Tyneside. She spent her childhood playing amongst buildings earmarked for urban clearance in Elswick – an area of Newcastle that was the backdrop to some of her most well-known images. Tish was encouraged by acquaintances to pursue her interest in photography and studied at a local college, where tutors advised her to progress to the highly regarded documentary photography course at Newport.

She returned to the North East with a growing reputation for her work, later moving to London where her photographs were exhibited alongside the likes of Bill Brandt. But Murtha struggled to make a living, especially after becoming a mother, leading to a return to the North East. Her work wasn’t exhibited again in her lifetime and she spent her later years scraping by, applying for any sort of low-paid job going, before dying in 2013 aged just 56.

The film explores the driving purposes behind Murtha’s work, taken largely from within communities she herself inhabited. She captured and celebrated individual characters and communal experiences, even as she critiqued the situations her subjects found themselves in. Sng traces Murtha’s creative growth – and how that creativity was battered down by circumstances – as well as her anger at the scourge of mass unemployment and how it damaged lives and communities.

After moving to the capital, Murtha photographed people who made their living in London’s nightlife, some of whom she lived with. Her ability to immerse herself in this very different world and portray it just as vividly demonstrates her talent. Yet this nightlife project was to mark a high point in terms of her recognition within the cultural sphere, one she was unable to reach again during her lifetime.

Early in the film, photographer Mik Critchlow, who himself strikingly documented the Northumberland mining communities that he grew up in, says ‘You have to be in the tribe to photograph the tribe. You have to do the same dance.’ Critchlow’s statement encapsulates the power that underpins Murtha’s images. Her photographs of the children in Elswick do not romanticise or aestheticise its decaying urban landscape: their focus is on those kids as individuals, making the best of things despite what surrounds them.

Meanwhile, her images of Juvenile Jazz Bands might, in other, outsider hands, have resulted in a simplistic celebration of a ‘quirky’ North East cultural phenomenon of military-influenced marching bands. Murtha, though, took a critical eye to these bands, questioning what she felt wasn’t an adequate substitute for the real creative opportunities working-class young people lacked. This provoked the ire of some in the community. In response, she invited her critics to a public debate. To me, this clearly demonstrates the need to commission working-class artists to document their own communities. While some might think local creatives lack critical distance, it is in fact the insider’s eye that looks deepest, understands the wider context, and can confidently critique aspects of their own culture – even if it does not always win friends. Another piece of Murtha’s writing, read by Peake, details how she came to separate herself from Side Gallery in Newcastle and won an employment dispute with them. She dismisses a ‘clique’ at the gallery that saw ‘working-class poverty as beautiful’.

Peake later reads out an Arts Council England funding application written by Murtha, detailing her plan to document the diverse, working-class community of central Middlesbrough, where she ended up living towards the end of her life. The grant application was rejected. This is intercut with readings of some of Murtha’s job applications for work in kitchens and factories, adding to her CV, ‘I am also a keen photographer’. The dispiriting, dry jargon Murtha had to adopt for job applications contrasts strikingly with her passionate writing about photography and the subjects that she was covering.

Watching TISH in West Yorkshire, I could not help but think of Andrea Dunbar, the author of Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982) whose early talent, difficult later life and death aged just 29 have been examined across films, books and plays, including Clio Barnard’s The Arbor (2010) and Adelle Stripe’s Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile (2017).

As was also said of Dunbar, some of Murtha’s friends and relatives acknowledge that she could be ‘difficult’ and was someone who refused to compromise. One friend recalled how she got Murtha a teaching job in which she apparently lasted less than half a day. There, however, is the rub. We tend to admire artists who refuse to compromise in what they do – yet such tenacity is easier when you have people and things to fall back on. Dedicating yourself wholly to your creative work is so much harder when you have no external means of support – and even more so when you have caring responsibilities for others.

Working-class artists are frequently forced into situations where, if they cannot afford to invest all their time and energy in their creative work in order to get noticed by those in power, they risk being frozen out of already limited opportunities. The systems of cultural production and distribution and the critical ecosystem that influences them still take little account of how those from structurally disadvantaged backgrounds might come to creativity in later life, or might be forced to dip in and out of making art and balance it with other forms of work. Too often, talented people fall by the wayside because an inflexible system that constantly demands what is ‘new’ and ‘fresh’ to feed itself excludes those who cannot fit its narrow parameters.

There is also the matter of expectation. Artists from more privileged backgrounds often have the confidence, instilled from early childhood, that things will probably work out, that you can focus on your personal goals and that you’ll have the space and support to do so. Those from disadvantaged backgrounds frequently do not have this sense of security. Devastatingly, in the film Ella Murtha reveals that after her mother passed, she got a rebate cheque from her energy supplier. Tish was significantly in credit, but had still been afraid to put the heating on, not knowing where she might find the money in future. Conditioned, perhaps, to think that she didn’t even deserve this basic survival need. I can think of little more socially damning than this important artist – this human being – not only being denied support for her creative work for years, but dying afraid to put the heating on.

In many respects, things have got worse since Murtha’s death in 2013 for artists from working-class backgrounds trying to survive, let alone thrive, in their careers. Social security has become harder to access and harder to live on. Many regional and more accessible arts courses have been cut and fees have become prohibitive. Arts Council funding has been reduced, and many arts organisations, especially in the UK regions, are struggling badly.

Yet, there has been a growing, if overdue, interest in and critical respect for Murtha’s work. The film details that, since her death, Murtha’s photography has been collected and exhibited by Tate Britain. There has also been an increasing interest in the work of other photographers who captured working-class communities such as Mik Critchlow and Chris Killip – both of whom were interviewed for this film and are sadly no longer with us.

In part, I think this is due to the internet making these images more widely available and easier to appreciate by many more people who do not visit galleries or collect photography books. Especially as, in many cases, the work of Murtha and others documents places, people and things that are no longer with us. The passage of time, of course, also means creative work inevitably goes through a cycle of being contemporary, becoming ‘passé’ and then being appreciated once again.

But there is something else at play. Part of the reason the work of these photographers drifted out of mainstream recognition, having never been valued as fine art in their time, is that artists engaging with and exploring class and venerating working-class communities became deeply unfashionable for a time in the 1990s and 2000s. More recently, especially with the declining socio-economic situation in the UK, class –  which, of course, never really went away – is back with a vengeance as a topic in mainstream discourse. Inequalities can no longer be ignored or glossed over while the numbers in poverty grow and spread far beyond the areas most gravely affected in the 1980s – those places, like Tyneside, that were the ‘canary in the mine’. Thus, the world of culture is belatedly acknowledging the power and importance of these images, what they captured, and the artists who made them.

TISH is especially resonant now, while living standards are plummeting. Though this is, of course, a different context to the mass unemployment in the 1980s, Murtha’s story did make me wonder: what artists are trying to tell the contemporary story of working-class life now, but cannot get their work seen or heard because of their socio-economic situation? Or because of a creative sector which doesn’t do enough to accommodate and support them?

In England, it seems we do a good line letting talented working-class artists down, so that they can barely make work, or at least none that is seen or heard widely. Then, after they are dead and gone, finally appreciating them. It’s easier to do that, I guess. But how many artists don’t get ‘rediscovered’ like this? How much working-class creativity and history are lost? How many people don’t even get the opportunity to create in the first place?

TISH is a moving, arresting documentary. One that should cement the importance of Tish Murtha’s work, and of Paul Sng as a documentarian. An even greater tribute to Murtha, though, would be to appreciate and support working-class artists while they’re still alive.

This piece was published by New Critique in December 2023.

“I’m Exploring Life”: 50 Years of Tom Wood’s Photos of Britain

Kenn Taylor

By Kenn Taylor

Lime Street, Lives Passing By. Photo: Tom Wood

Photie Man: 50 Years of Tom Wood at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery is the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the work of Wood, who is one of Britain’s most important image-makers. “It was something I wanted to do for the city,” Wood says. “The work was made here and I’ve had big shows all over the world; Moscow, France, China even, but not Liverpool.”

Wood’s images have until recently been more embraced by publishers and gallerists internationally. In the UK, he has sometimes been pigeonholed as a “documentarian of working-class Liverpool” rather than as a visual artist who creates striking, moving images that make people stop in their tracks, one of the issues being perhaps a middle-class dominated art sector struggling to grasp that working-class people could make and be the subject of great art without it needing to be social comment.

Boy with Fish, Secombe Docks 1980. Photo: Tom Wood.

“That lack of interest in Britain for a long time, it’s definitely partly a class thing. How I present myself but also the way photography is reviewed in a class way. ‘Not proper art’ and so on,” he says. For Wood, the contest between form and content was something interesting: “I thought a lot of stuff at art school, especially the conceptual stuff, was not real enough. It was like a game,” he says. “When I went out on the streets at the weekend, what I saw was more real and more interesting, but not in a documentary sense. I’m exploring my medium for sure, I’m an artist, but I’m exploring life as well.”

This expansive show features over 500 pictures, surveying his whole career, from images of his native Ireland and Leicester where he studied, to his current home in Wales and found photographs Wood collected as a young man. The largest element though are his photographs of Merseyside, where he lived for over two decades. One of Wood’s aims for the exhibition is to reconnect with some of the people he captured over the years and photograph them again. “That’s half the reason I have done the show,” he says. “To make that connection. You can leave details if you know people in the show.”

Lads at Railing, Scotland Road, 1987. Photo: Tom Wood.

The exhibition’s title comes from the nickname Wood was given in Merseyside as he became so familiar photographing the same communities repeatedly and building a reciprocal relationship with them. “I couldn’t do it otherwise,” he says. This extended even to taking wedding pictures for some of his subjects. Part of the power of his images perhaps comes from this deep familiarity. “Richard Feynman said he would not understand the real physics of a system until he had painstakingly isolated and calculated all the forces,” Wood says. “This is what I would tell myself as I was photographing the same subject year after year – whether it be women at the market, men at the football.”

Image from Photie Man: 50 Years of Tom Wood, Walker Art Gallery. Photo: Robin Clewley

Has looking back on his vast archive for this show changed his views on it? “Yeah, that’s the thing about photography. It’s not fixed, and life is not fixed. Things change, how it’s read changes,” he says. Not least a culture sector that now values photography, and this kind of subject matter, more. In the 90s, Wood managed to get an Arts Council grant after receiving a letter of support from Lee Friedlander. “It said ‘wonderful pictures. As good a set of pictures you see every five or ten years,’” only for Wood to then struggle to find anywhere to show the work. Does he feel vindicated by the growing interest from all quarters? He has three books due out this year alone. “A little bit,” he says. “Having Friedlander on board kept me going for a few years. A lot of people have supported the work over the years, not least the people in the pictures.”

Image from Photie Man: 50 Years of Tom Wood, Walker Art Gallery. Photo: Robin Clewley

“There’s something about the work that people from all over the globe connect to,” Wood says. “It’s very strange. I’m not impressive as a person. I think the work itself, or maybe Liverpool, maybe the people, I don’t know. But it does connect with people.” 

Image from Photie Man: 50 Years of Tom Wood, Walker Art Gallery. Photo: Robin Clewley

This piece was published by AnOther magazine in June 2023.

The Future is Birkenhead: cultural development on the left bank of the Mersey

Kenn Taylor

By Kenn Taylor

Later this year, the town of Birkenhead becomes an art gallery. The Town is the Gallery, a large-scale, multi-venue programme will encompass everything from pop-up galleries and public art installations to workshops and participatory projects. Ryan Gauge, co-founder of organisers Convenience Gallery, says, “Using the town as the canvas, we’re working to achieve the aim that anywhere can be a place for arts and culture.” Taking place over several months, the programme will peak in September. “We have had contact from over seventy artists so far and we’re really excited by all the proposals,” Ryan adds.

On the Brightside, Convenience Gallery in Cahoots. Photo: Convenience Gallery

The Town in the Gallery will be something of a culmination of creative growth which has been building in Birkenhead, my hometown, over the last few years. Not so long ago, like many similar post-industrial places, if Birkenhead was mentioned in the media at all, it was negatively. Yet, there are some who are now saying The Future is Birkenhead, as a set of cultural organisations, plans and projects are shaping into something other areas could learn from.

The outfit which has perhaps blazed the biggest trail in the town is venue Future Yard. Attracting national attention for everything from its community ownership model to its training programmes – and for coining that tongue in cheek slogan, The Future is Birkenhead.

Future Yard. Photo: Robin Clewley

Craig Pennington, Future Yard’s director, details what drove its foundation: “There’s a huge wealth of artists from this part of the world. There was little in the way of support for artists and very little in the way of access to the industry for local young people. The idea was: stop thinking about a venue as a nice-to-have cultural asset. Think about it as an absolutely key anchor institution that can bring about dynamic and meaningful change in a place.”

That Birkenhead is now listed on touring schedules alongside much larger cities is powerful, but Future Yard’s impact goes beyond that. “Now 80% of the employed staff in the venue have come through our Soundcheck training programme,” says Pennington.

Photo: Robin Clewley

These however are just two examples of culture-focused developments making change in the town. If all goes to plan, within a few years Birkenhead will have at least two creative studio complexes with event and exhibition spaces; two sites dedicated to fostering wellbeing through creativity; a artists residency space in an former observatory; two new museums and a new park with spaces for cultural activities. For the most part, this is all happening in places that were previously empty or underused.

While these developments are happening in co-operation with the local authority, it’s significant that they are by and large being defined and led by grassroots organisations. This is in contrast other past examples of cultural regeneration in post-industrial places such as in Gateshead and Bilbao. Pennington says: “You have a small number of organisations with shared aspirations and ideas, but working in different ways and in different spaces. Clustering those geographically has had a profound impact.”

Another of those organisations is Open Door, which provides mental health support. Birkenhead, in common with many post-industrial areas, has poor health outcomes, so such a charity is vital. But how did they end up running the Bloom Building, which hosts everything from workshops and exhibitions to performances and events?

Bloom Building. Photo: Lydia Tweed

“Bloom is rewriting the rules around how the worlds of culture, community, social action and mental health can flourish together,” says Frankie Hughes from Bloom. “Reimagining not only common approaches to mental health, but also how culture can act as the catalyst for change and cultivate social value.”

Open Door are now planning an additional new facility called ‘Joy’ developed in partnership with a local NHS Trust. The aim is for it to be a national centre of excellence in how culture and wellbeing sit alongside clinical services. Development Director Ella Holland says: “Arts and culture will bring people to the centre; everything within it should all wrap around this central theme.”

In some ways, these developments should not be a surprise. Birkenhead had the world’s first municipal park and the first school of art outside London. It was also home to an important Arts and Crafts pottery and one of the few UK firms to produce fine tapestries. Creativity and urban innovation are rooted in its history, yet this has been obscured by the profound impact of its economic decline.

Make Hamilton Studios. Photo: Graham Smillie

The town’s history is the focus of another of Convenience Gallery’s projects. Ryan Gauge says: “The Uncovering Birkenhead’s Working Class History project is about championing local memories, stories and histories. Birkenhead is at a pivotal point in its cultural development and we want to ensure the people’s history is a part its future.” In the longer term, Convenience Gallery are also looking to open their own space.

All this cultural development isn’t happening in isolation; it’s part of a wider masterplan the Council say is the town’s biggest transformation since rebuilding after the devastation of WWII. Crucially, it does not fall into the trap of thinking that cultural projects alonecan regenerate a post-industrial town, as has happened elsewhere in the past. Connecting some of these developments up will be the new Dock Branch Park. Created from a long-abandoned freight railway line, the park will include space for outdoor exhibitions, installations, performances and education. As well as a new museum, The Transport Shed. These projects are particularly personal for me, as my dad worked for many years in the attached railway workshops.

Dock Branch walking tour. Photo: PLACED

Architecture and design practice OPEN is working on plans for the area. Director Jaimie Ferguson says: “Dock Branch Park physically connects the key features in the town centre and provides unique new green spaces as part of a transformed public realm, but it also says a lot about how Birkenhead sees itself in the future.” He continues: “We’ve also been collaborating with artist Di Mainstone to develop ideas for a cultural programme around a bio-diverse revolution.”

Impression of Dock Branch Park. Image: Open

So far so good, but is some of Birkenhead’s cultural growth simply due to the extensive urban development that’s taken place in central Liverpool, so close by? Gentrification might be a concern. Yet as a phenomenon, gentrification tends to have its most negative impacts in cities (and their satellites) which have the largest concentrations of wealth and power. While it might one day become an issue for Birkenhead, it is currently a long way down a list of bigger challenges around employment, poverty, health, dereliction and access to opportunities and services. There of course is the crux that underpins many of the UK’s problems – intense over development in some places and deep-seated underinvestment in others.

I ask Craig Pennington what he thinks is needed to ensure everything achieved so far in terms of culture and community is built on: “Whenever you have a situation where profound change is happening in a place,” he says, “you have to be really, really mindful of the fact that local people are at the heart of shaping what that change is.”

Convenience Gallery co-founder Andy Shaw agrees: “Naturally with change comes some apprehension that it might be something not for local people, but Birkenhead feels like it’s doing it differently. It’s grassroots and community-led.”

Make Hamilton Studios. Photo: Make CIC

If what is currently happening on the left bank of the Mersey means one thing for other areas, it’s that cultural development in post-industrial places has to be driven by local needs and opportunities. By specificity and originality. Not only will this serve local citizens better, uniqueness is also what attracts wider attention.

Ryan Gauge says: “We would love to see more jobs created locally and especially within the creative industries, passing on opportunities for the next generation to have tangible creative careers and to really see these as accessible and viable options.” 

Future Yard outdoor space. Photo: Robin Clewley

This is a key point. To make a regular living form creative work, you usually need to be part of a wider infrastructure. Can this cultural growth lead to increased employment in the creative sector locally? Perhaps even five years ago, this may have seemed a pipe dream. Yet there appears to be some increasing dispersal of cultural jobs away from the south-east. That area’s huge dominance adds to the inequalities of the sector. Channel 4’s move to Leeds and the BBC to Salford have attracted attention, but organisations from Hachette to Art UK and EMI have also been shifting operations northwards, while smaller cities like Sunderland and Wakefield are developing their creative sectors significantly. Could this be the next step for Birkenhead?

While writing this, I began reading The North Will Rise Again by Tyneside based Alex Niven and kept thinking of a quote he opens with, taken from the processional banners of Durham miners: 

”The past we inherit. The future we build.”

Photo: Robin Clewley

This piece was published by The Quietus in May 2023.

Representing Post-Industrial Communities in Culture

Kenn Taylor

By Kenn Taylor

I grew up on Merseyside in the 1980s and 90s, when this region around Liverpool found itself on the extreme end of the UK’s wave of industrial decline in that period. This had a profound effect on my working-class family and community, and it shaped the way I think ever since.

Later, a period of new investment in culture and heritage in the area as a form of urban regeneration, coupled with increasing access to higher education, enabled me to work in creative fields not remotely accessible to my parents.

Yet this very access exposed me to the hollowness of some of these changes. Moving through different kinds of cultural work showed me how few working-class people worked in those sectors, except in the poorest paid service positions. It also made clear why their absence mattered. Rather than representing the experiences of working-class communities, many cultural productions treated them as ‘other’. Too often, they used and patronised the working class.

As I have written in the Journal of Class and Culture, most coverage of post-industrial communities comes from outsiders looking in. Their narratives often veer between relentlessly negative, stereotype-ridden stories and patronising ‘boosterist’ coverage, with all subtlety absent. On the rare occasions when people from such communities get to tell their own stories, they can be distorted by those who dominate and control the platforms where they appear.

My experience gave me an interest in the work of other practitioners who grew up in post-industrial communities had training which enabled them to work in creative fields, and then spent at least part of their energy drawing attention to where they came from. Many of these cultural workers have struggled to ensure their insider perspective is heard by a wider audience.

A good example is the 2021 short film Made in Doncaster by artist and writer Rachel Horne. The Guardian newspaper sent its ‘Anywhere but Westminster’ team to cover the Yorkshire city of Doncaster, and they invited Horne to be a subject of their film. Editor of a long running local zine, Doncopolitan, Horne responded with a challenge: if you want to make a film about the area, we’ll make it together. This attracted a great deal of positive attention nationally and highlighted Horne’s efforts to create a local media voice in the face of the decline of regional newspapers and radio. That decline has made journalism a more elitist trade and reduced opportunities for people living in disadvantaged regions to provide a counterpoint to skewed coverage from national outlets.

The film shows Horne’s determined efforts to feature the voices of people like her and provide visibility for the talent and creativity of the community, not just its problems. As Horne explains, solutions to those problems need to be led from within: “We’re resilient and we don’t need to be patronised. We don’t need experts coming in telling us how to fix things. We want to fix things on our own terms and that’s the way it’s going to work.”

In the film, Horne emphasizes the influence of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike: “I was born in the miners’ strike. I lived through that whole collapse. It’s not just unemployment it’s like the whole culture went and then you’ve got ten years of austerity.” That influence is also clear in Sherwood, a 2022 BBC drama series created by writer James Graham who grew up in a mining village outside Nottingham, the setting for the series. This powerful drama explores a range of themes, including how all its characters are haunted, one way or another, by the miner’s strike and the subsequent disappearance of the coal industry in the area.

One of the tragedies of my lifetime is that the damage caused by the evacuation of industry without replacement, something once contained to certain areas, has, rather than being remedied in such places, instead gone on to consume much of UK. Sherwood highlights what many in the British establishment have been trying to gloss over and forget since the 1980s. As one of its principal characters puts it, “They didn’t care about us then, the don’t care about us now, they just use us. Look at what they still call us, what we call ourselves. A former mining town. Why? Post-industrial. How the hell are we meant to move on from that when even the way we talk about ourselves is by what we aren’t anymore? How are my grandkids meant to imagine a future beyond that, eh?” The spectre of deindustrialisation haunts Britain.

No other developed country has de-industrialised to the extent that Britain has. And artists like Horne and Graham, who grew up in deindustrialised places, can help us understand what happened and what life is like in these communities now, far better than the misrepresentations projected on to them by others. 

Graham, Horne, and I were able to attend university, where we honed our abilities to probe into and communicate about such things, drawing on direct experiences. The expansion in higher education from the 1960s to the 2000s gave us increased access to power to ask difficult questions and express the complex truths of our experiences and our communities. But such access, especially in the arts and humanities, is now contracting in the UK. In particular at the universities with the highest proportion of working-class students. Like us, young people from such communities today not only have limited local employment options, but they also have fewer educational opportunities.

Both Made in Doncaster and Sherwood contain hope for the potential of working-class cultures and communities in post-industrial areas. That hope comes from the resilience of people in such communities despite everything thrown at them.  It’s a hope though mixed with an ambiguity and a degree of cynicism that comes from having seen so little change for the better at a fundamental level over several decades. If we want anything to improve in future, voices like these must be heard more widely.

This piece was published by Working Class Perspectives in May 2023. It is taken from a paper I presented at the Transnationalizing Deindustrialization Studies: Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time (DePOT) 2022 Conference, Bochum, Germany, August 17-20, 2022.

Every Man and Woman is a Star

Kenn Taylor

Photie Man: 50 Years of Tom Wood, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 20 May 2023 – 7 Jan 2024

Photo: Robin Clewley

By Kenn Taylor

Even if you’ve not heard of Tom Wood, the photographer now subject to a huge retrospective at the Walker, you’re likely to have come across his images: young sharply-dressed folks confidently posing for the camera; dancers lit up by flash in an 1980s nightclub; a grandparent and child clinging to each other as they stare through a bus window.

Wood hails from County Mayo, in Ireland, and he’s exhibited everywhere from the USA to the Netherlands, China to France. Yet, as he’s best known for his images of Merseyside, it’s fitting this — the most comprehensive show of his work ever — should be staged in Liverpool.

Born in 1951, Wood moved from Ireland to Cowley, Oxford at a young age with his family. After working in a tax office and the local car factory, he was encouraged to take up art and studied painting in Leicester from 1973-76. He borrowed a camera, initially to record his paintings, and began to experiment with the medium that would dominate his creative life.

‘NTLEMAN. Photo: Tom Wood

The first gallery in the Walker show, ‘The 1970s’, covers Wood’s earliest work, much of it black and white. Even in these first pictures, his talent for capturing people’s character in a single shot is evident. ‘NTLEMAN’, featuring two young women posing beneath a broken sign for the men’s toilets, was taken by Wood in Cowley in 1973 on the second ever roll of film he shot; it remains one of his most well-known works. His ability is evident even in the small, now discoloured, prints from a season he spent working as a holiday camp photographer.

The second gallery, ‘The 1980s’, marks Wood’s move to Liverpool in 1978 after gaining employment as a technician in the School of Art (now LJMU). This period saw him starting to also work in colour, in works such as in ‘Not Miss New Brighton’ from 78-79. Colour was then still considered suspect in the world of ‘art’ photography, but Wood has said it was always important to him. 

Not Miss New Brighton. Photo: Tom Wood

This, the largest gallery, contains some of Wood’s most well-known works from the 25 years he then spent living in and continually photographing Merseyside. While his images of cocky lads like ‘Mark and the gang’ and ‘Lads at railing, Scotland Road’ are some of the best photographs of that aspect of the area’s culture, unlike many image makers who briefly descend on Merseyside with only stereotypes in mind, Wood captures a much more diverse range of people and places across the region, from the sparkling ‘Furcoatsisters’ to the serious and proud-looking ‘The Staff of Secombe Café’ to the even more proud and pleased ‘Couple with new baby (actually first day out without the baby)’ and the 80s alternative fashions of ‘Mike and Kerrie — Every Man and Woman is a Star’.

Couple with new baby (actually first day without the baby) Photo: Tom Wood

The exhibition’s title reflects the fact that Wood became known as ‘the photie man’ in the area, a figure so familiar that people willingly posed for him or at least didn’t bat an eyelid when he was snapping away. Wood offered prints to many of his subjects and took pictures at local weddings and christenings, charging only for the price of the film, all of which helped him to develop an important reciprocal relationship with his subjects. Some of Wood’s most evocative images, like ‘Seaview Cafe (Not many Saturdays off)’ from 1984 are of families on days out in New Brighton. The openness people display within Wood’s viewfinder speaks time and again to an ease and familiarity between photographer and subject.

Some of Tom Wood nightclub images from the exhibition. Photo: Robin Clewley

The pictures he took in New Brighton’s nightclubs, candidly capturing those fleeting moments of flirtation, rejection, humour and introspection, were facilitated by Wood being a regular face in those clubs. These images received international acclaim when they were published in 1989 as the photobook Looking for Love. His ‘Untitled (sea of bodies, Grand Hotel, New Brighton)’ almost elevates the scene of a packed nightclub to the level of an epic history painting. And in All Zones Off Peak, the photographs Wood took on his innumerable bus journeys around the region have a powerful quality of light, such as ‘Towards Netherton’ and ‘Vauxhall Circular’, in which the red hair of the subject is echoed by a touch of sunlight on the seat fabric. 

Towards Netherton. Photo: Tom Wood

Wood rarely undertook commissions, but two that he did take on resulted in some of his most poignant images. For these he entered two closed worlds in Merseyside, Birkenhead’s Cammell Laird shipyard and the large psychiatric hospital at Rainhill, photographing the end of these institutions in their original form. Wood’s recurring theme of the space between generations comes across more powerfully in his Laird’s images. Picturing the yard’s last batch of young apprentices and an older man at the same workbench used by his father before him, Wood captures them all facing uncertainty as the endpoint is reached of nearly 200 years of employment and social structure.

From the Cammell Laird series. Photo: Tom Wood

The images from Rainhill Hospital are prudently placed in a discreet area of the gallery. All these photographs were taken with permission from patients or their families. Most of the residents are older and, while the majority should have never been institutionalised, Wood depicts them also facing an uncertain future as the place that in some cases they’d known for most of their lives closes around them. Wood was contracted to take pictures at Rainhill for six weeks; he ended up engaging with the community there for two years.

The final gallery contains Wood’s work from 2003 onwards, when he had left Merseyside and moved to Wales. While his scenes of village and town life in Wales and his native Ireland have a similar tone to that of his Merseyside work, Wood’s panoramic landscapes from the period have an expansiveness which contrasts with the intimacy of his portraits. Yet they still evidence a strong eye for detail, as in the tractors rendered tiny by the imposing landscape of ‘Moon Moving Over Iron Age Farming’ from 2006.

Loggerheads Clifftop, Towards Moel Famau, 2010. Photo: Tom Wood

Surrounded by the varied images of the exhibition, some words keep coming back. Words like strength and dignity. Humour too, his work isn’t po-faced, nor overly sentimental. Wood’s images are inherently about the variety and commonality of the human experience. Youth and age. Passion and boredom. Waiting for a bus or to be served a hotdog made epic.

The exhibition’s concluding section includes ‘The Hospital’, a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, which Wood says reflects some of what motivates his work. Its closing lines are:

For we must record love’s mystery without claptrap, 

Snatch out of time the passionate transitory.

Tom Wood is undoubtedly one of the most respected and important visual artists to have been based in Merseyside in the past fifty years. The region is lucky to have had a photographer of such powerful talent capture its life over a couple of decades, reflecting Merseyside in artworks that have resonated around the world. At the show’s exit, Wood acknowledges his indebtedness to all those who appeared before his camera and inspired him to create these photographs.

Photo: Robin Clewley

After all, to borrow from one his titles, in Wood’s images, every man and woman (and child) is a star.

This piece was published by the Liverpool Post in June 2023.

New Brighton

Kenn Taylor


Words by Kenn Taylor
Images by Kenn Taylor and Denise Courcoux

Our Day Out. A place of colour. And what colour. The vivid orange of the Golden Goose arcade. The deep saltwashed blue of the folding RNLI doors. The flaking yellow and green of the New Palace. Its canopied row of smiling plastic signs screaming sugar-sparkling doughnuts, cold ice cream and rubbery hot dogs.
Our Day Out. A place of colour. And what colour. The vivid orange of the Golden Goose arcade. The deep saltwashed blue of the folding RNLI doors. The flaking yellow and green of the New Palace. Its canopied row of smiling plastic signs screaming sugar-sparkling doughnuts, cold ice cream and rubbery hot dogs.

The trilling lights and honking, metallic din of the Bright Spot. Enticed in to feed 2p’s to the ever smoothly rolling pushers in the hope of a tide of copper. Then through to the dark and exciting New Palace with its sparking Dodgems and fast clanking Wurlitzers. The bowling alley next door, even in the 90s still not equipped with computers. Instead, overhead projectors, pencil and paper to score.

Devouring the colour and the sugar. Behind the zinging orange plastic though, the tiredness, the wear, the lack of the New in New Brighton. Growing up in 1980s Merseyside, decay was too often part of the everyday. Eating hot dogs in a shelter long since seen a lick of paint. Watching crazy golf balls loop through elaborate creations scored with cracks and rust. Up the steep streets away from the front, rows of empty shops long before such things became a national concern. The extinguished neon of The Chelsea Reach nightclub. A vague memory of the white walls of a large swimming pool, just before it went to the wrecking ball. The striking tiled finger-pointing arrow outside a shuttered public toilet always staying in the mind for some reason.

This town was built by what we’d call now a property developer for money, borrowing its name from its southern forebear. A segment of the Wallasey. The ‘island of the Welsh’. Out on the edge. End of the line. Tales from my parents of a pier, a ballroom, a ferry, a big funfair and the largest open air pool in the world. Now in place of all that, just a concrete adjunct, a lumpy park and a patch of wasteland. Stories of the Good Old Days I loved as a child, then as a teenager came to resent. The past offered nothing to the young. The present very little. The future was uncertain. This is a feeling that would grow familiar to more and more of the UK as time passed, but back then, it was contained to parts of it like ours. Why was everything so run down, would it ever get any better?

As a teenager the seaside still offers Our Day Out, but with different motivations. The ice cream and the arcades continue to attract, but now we hang out on our own. Looking to the expansive sky and sea. Wondering if our lives can be anything other than what they’re expected to be. Far horizons for people given narrow ones. Enjoyment tempered by a self-consciousness that only illicit access to alcohol can reduce. Then a ride back on the dodgems unlocks something deeper. Watching The Beach, its exotic locations and privileged characters seeming as remote as anything set on an alien planet. Good soundtrack though. We’re told Things Can Only Get Better. The cinema closes soon afterwards. ‘Investment’ gets mentioned in the local papers. Artist impressions of Things That Never Happen or Not Like They Were Supposed To. A record fair in an old hotel makes hearing new albums more affordable. The hotel too closes soon afterwards.

Taking an interest now in broader things. Looking beyond those horizons. Realising with surprise that people from across the globe look at pictures of New Brighton. Taken by Martin Parr. In almost every general photographic textbook published. Those bright colours from memory preserved, even brighter. The yellow sand, the long blue sky. The dripping red sauces on hot dogs and ice cream. The rubbish too, and the decay. All captured for posterity. This brings some joy. How cool is that? A place so close by, captured in the period of my childhood, world famous in The History of Art. But then, beginning to realise that many of the people consuming these images are laughing at us, not with us. That these pictures miss some of the warmth, the fun. What that colour offered to people without the means to travel further. Realising that what they are seeing has been framed in a particular way by an outsider. I begin to understand the power of images. The power of stories. And the power held by the narrow selection of people who control the images and the stories.

Later, I also learn of the New Brighton images of Tom Wood. A photographer who stayed for years and understood the grain of the place. Around the same time, Colin Vearncombe, better known as Black, captured New Brighton rendered in dreamy monochrome in the video for his song ‘Wonderful Life’ directed by Gerard de Thame. Cutting between the dignity and joy local faces and the sheer expansiveness of this corner of Merseyside. The ice white lighthouse against a dark estuary.

An adult, almost. Things Didn’t Really Get Better but They Did Change. The marine lake shrinks and a retail park is built. It has no romance but shops that people use. The swimming pool never comes back. Bad art is installed. A new cinema opens. The theatre for the old folks expands across the ruin of the Crazy Golf. The Chelsea Reach becomes flats. There’s money enough again now to paint the shelters. Things look tidier. The bowling alley remerges with computers. As shelf stackers, we have our Christmas Do in there and someone sides shirtless down the polished lane. We will not be welcomed back. Things are new, but they’re boxy, cheap. The colour seems to have drained away to leave white metal sheds and sheet glass. A thin veneer, like so much was then. A vague attempt at being respectable for those who live in high apartments beyond the station.

Then, almost as if it never left, austerity returns. The dreams of renewal fade. The public sphere withdraws. Things close down. For the want of money, the shelters begin to flake again. Weeds grow tall in cracks. Invest in Property they say. Flats are all that is built. Some of the new shops and restaurants begin to evacuate the retail park as the tide of chainstore expansion recedes.

I live on the other side now. Our Day Out now involves a bike and a ferry and a bike again, along the long promenade from the chemical tanks of Seacombe and past the memorial to those who died digging the cross-river tunnels. Old enough at this point for some of my own nostalgia. This used to be here, this was like that. I cannot say it was better in the past though. I was younger and I knew less. But I know this place deserves more, this world-famous subject of photography. Martin Parr opens his foundation in wealthy Bristol. Across the water giant red giraffes raise up. Seen through the heat haze of the day then starkly illuminated at night. The promise of this estuary being a centre of World Trade again. Waiting for a Golden Goose. When the boat comes in. It hasn’t yet.

I move further away, but return often. Now with my own child. Then a local guy with more vision than 2,000 consultants combined decided things must change. Importantly, he also has the money and time for change. Empty shops re-open. Venues, pubs, markets. People take notice. Murals and street art go up, better than the bad art from the regeneration quangos. People take and share pictures, not of litter, but of painted buildings. The colour returns. There is something New in New Brighton.

Down on the waterfront though, The New Palace, the heart of the promenade, faces demolition. Still not enough money, not enough will. Decay continues to hover in the background. As ever round here, change for the better seems fragile.

This place means more than you can imagine. It is far more than a footnote in art history. It’s still, as it’s always been, Our Day Out.

This piece was published by Caught by the River in February 2023.

The Stands Of Time: Casual Culture On Display

Kenn Taylor

Words and images Kenn Taylor

Image of various Mannequins on a terraced display. They are wearing various forms of Casual style fashions. Hung behind are images of football crowds.

Art of the Terraces, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
05 Nov 2022 – 12 Mar 2023

“One of the biggest working class youth cults ever but because its home was the football terraces rather than universities or art schools it went largely unexplored by the media.”

This quote from Paolo Hewitt opens the show. The first thing that hits you though is the ‘gang’ of mannequins decked out in some of the iconic clobber of Casuals culture: polo shirts and sports jackets to cords and drainpipe jeans. And of course, trainers – especially Adidas trainers. It creates a strong first impression. Just as it must have done to see a group of lads dressed like this in the street on a grey day in 1981.

Art of the Terraces roots itself in the Casuals subculture that emerged in the 1970s and is the first major exhibition to explore it in detail. As Hewitt suggests, it has gone far less examined compared to other scenes such as New Romantic or Punk which found themselves canonised far more quickly. This despite the fact that the Casuals certainly had a longer lasting impact on everyday dress than many other subcultures.

The first gallery details the emergence of the subculture. The origin of the Casuals is particularly associated with Liverpool FC fans travelling to Europe in the 1970s and 80s. Those fans brought back sportswear unavailable in the UK, drawing attention on the football terraces. Throughout the 1980s, the scene constantly adapted as adherents competed for the best looks, moving into the ‘retro scally’ style, featuring tweeds and collarless shirts, then onto higher end fashion brands like Fiorucci and Chevignon – sometimes to the confusion (and even unease) of such brands more used to selling their wares to fans of tennis and golf. Apparel aside, the fanzine culture that developed in the same period is also acknowledged by the show, including the influential The End which documented the changing fashions of the Casuals. Copies of the more recent Solezine and Girlfans demonstrate some of the contemporary continuity of cultural expression from that era.

Image of a vitrine containing football zines of different eras and magazines and tickets from the early 1980s during the emergence of Casuals culture.

In the second gallery, the exhibition extends beyond the Casuals to a wider exploration of art related to football fan culture from the last few decades. Stephen Dean’s film Volta surrounds your senses on entering. Created from crowd footage taken from across fourteen matches in Rio, it goes someway to encapsulating the feel of being immersed in a fever pitch stadium mass. Frank Green’s detailed watercolours of fans streaming in to Goodison Park and Anfield in the 1989–90 season, meanwhile, capture the period just before changes brought in by the Taylor Report and the Premier League.

Watercolour by Frank Green of Goodison Park 1989-90

Steve Randall’s impressionistic paintings of young Casuals in the Liverpool New Town of Kirkby are particularly evocative. While Ross Muir’s work referencing Vermeer and van Gogh re-appropriates classic art images the way Casuals did with high-end brands. Adidas’s three stripes permeate his paintings as they do in so much of this show, but it’s the penetrating gaze of his faces which stay with you. Muir, like Randall, came to art later in life and the exhibition contains many works by people who might be labelled ‘outsider artists’. Yet, while they may be outsiders to the mainstream art world, they are insiders to the cultures represented.

The exhibition text notes the profound shift in the 1970s in the cities which had given birth to professional football in the nineteenth century, as industry collapsed and with it many of the structures that had defined working class lives. This seismic change saw new working class cultures of expression emerge in the gap created, with the Casuals themselves being a prime example. Jamie Holman’s tapestry Who Are Ya? explores this. The mass workforces of the mills created the audience for professional football. As the mills emptied out, they were re-occupied for warehouse parties by young people. They created a new culture as the working lives their parents had known disappeared.

Image of the 'Who Are Ya' tapestry by Jamie Holman. It is a black and white football crowd scene.
‘Who Are Ya’ tapestry by Jamie Holman

The ‘Coming of Age’ section places the Causals in the context of the decades of youth subcultures that emerged post-World War II in the great age of popular culture, alongside groups like the Teddy Boys and Mods, precursors in the same lineage. In taking clothing associated with more luxurious lifestyles and giving them new forms of meaning, the Casuals were re-writing what was expected of working class young people. As a new consumerist world boomed in the wider culture, even as their own cities declined, this was the response. The desire to ‘look sharp’ and show off when going out, especially when your working life involves wearing a uniform or overalls, functions as a form of resistance to the economic and social status to which you are prescribed by society. This stands in contrast to those from more privileged backgrounds, including those who dominate the cultural sectors, sometimes ‘dressing down’ – either to mask their status or because their sense of security exceeds their need to demonstrate it visibly.

There are tensions and contradictions here of course, as in all youth cultures, including between the desire to fit in and the desire to stand out. These pressures are perhaps also more extreme in working class communities. As the exhibition documents, the Casuals contributed to the development of the now huge designer ‘athlesuire’ industry. As someone whose family had little money and endured grief for only being able to afford ‘shitty makes’, I’m acutely aware of how young people can be made to feel inferior if they can’t pay for such expensive clobber. This wasn’t invented by the Causals, of course, but the platforming of high-end brands in the subculture has had consequences in working class communities. As the cost of living bites ever harder, some exploration of this in the exhibition would have been good.

What is better acknowledged are the issues of violence and racism on the terraces. While the ‘Kick it Out’ section of the show notes that many Casuals avoided violence and acted against racism, the show as a whole doesn’t shy away from addressing football’s issues with them. This is perhaps most powerfully explored in Marcin Dudek’s video works and paintings, influenced by his own experience of finding identity in a group of Ultras. With him turning away from violence after the death of one of his friends. The orange from the linings of the bomber jackets worn by the group he was part of being a constant motif in his work.

Satch Hoyt’s stark Penalty, a human sculpture in a kicking pose made from the black tongues of Puma football boots, was created in response to the continued racial abuse of players. Quoting former player and BBC presenter Jermaine Jenas, the exhibition text notes, “In the 70s and early 80s, bananas were thrown on the pitch at players feet. Now bananas are thrown in people’s emojis.”

Image of the video artwork which is displayed on a CRT television: Tales of Trains to Far-Flung Places – Ordinary to Chelsea by Pastel Castle (aka Emily Garner)
Image of the set created in the gallery of a 1980s style bedroom of a Casuals affiliated teenager.

The final gallery is dominated by a mocked-up bedroom of a Causal-affiliated teenager which includes one of the stand-out pieces in the show. Tales of Trains to Far-Flung Places – Ordinary to Chelsea by Pastel Castle (aka Emily Garner) is a work in the style of a 1980s computer game, featuring Casuals high-tailing it on a quest around Europe. It has a self-aware wit that seems appropriate as a homage to the era.The exhibition is bookended by Mark Leckey’s seminal film, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. This work sums up many of the key aspects of the exhibition, as Leckey reaches back into working class cultures using archival material that was almost lost, weaving it together using the language of contemporary art. A central scene of young lads decked out in colour walking through a housing estate as a voiceover dictates a mantra of Casuals related brands is as if the mannequins that opened the exhibition have become animated.

There’s a risk with a show like this of falling into nostalgia for people of a certain age. But Art of the Terraces is not without contemporary relevance, given the long-term impacts of the Casuals. Football zines have largely given way to fan podcasts and you can now keep your trainers on in the office. The context for the Casuals culture emerging is profoundly different from today’s multimedia world. Yet young people are once again being offered little and having to build something themselves. Hopefully the next phase of influential working class cultural expression won’t take as many years as this one to receive some proper acknowledgement.

This piece was published by The Quietus in December 2022.

Church Valley

Kenn Taylor

By Kenn Taylor

I grew up in a region that was scarred by economic decline and disinvestment. It was a surprise to me as I got older and travelled further that some people thought decaying buildings, places abandoned and boarded-up, areas of wasteland that stayed there forever, were unusual, exciting even.

Sure, I can appreciate the more interesting visual layers to be found where nature is eating away at human effort. But I’ve also experienced how so many places get reduced to just that decay. How the media will pick out declined structures to capture a picture they had in mind before they even arrived, avoiding the dozens of well-maintained streets nearby. Grab a few shots of the shittest alley they can find, then back off quickly to the better parts of London or Manchester to file their story. I’ve seen the power of such stories to distort perceptions and how that can damage people and places.

People living in communities like the one at this crossroads face many issues; a shortage of good jobs, a frustrating lack of amenities and declining public services. Parts of the media though will portray it as if that’s all there is. A litany of decay and despair for their readers to consume so they can feel that, however miserable their lives are, someone somewhere else is living worse than them, so that’s okay. Yet yards from that shitty alley, there are houses and gardens in good nick. Footy banners out. Railings brightly painted. Chalk paint on the floor from kids playing. The buildings which are empty have long faded into the background of everyday existence for those who live here, which might seem strange to those from places where every square foot is intensely capitalised. People have got their corner here, however modest, and they get on with it, despite all that is stacked against them, all that is thrown at them.

This landscape, though, visibly demonstrates the pain that its residents have been through. So much writing on urban life for the past 10-15 years has been about too much growth – too many people, too much construction, too much development. At least the writing from the richest metropolises which dominate the media, arts and academia. Yet that growth never reached many places. Such urban decay is scar tissue in a community whose environment has been wrought time and again by decades of disinvestment and bad decisions by people far away. Political stripes may change, but people still find themselves used or forgotten.

This was and is a working-class community. Unlike the London narrative of gentrification, the environment around this crossroads is what happens when first you take away the economy. Then people start to leave. Then there’s too many buildings that are no longer needed. Then so many of the things which make a coherent, thriving neighbourhood shrink away. As more people leave, especially the young, and aren’t replaced by new incomers, optimism for positive change declines. There are still useful bits of public infrastructure from when various governments had brief periods of largesse, but these are now too often falling apart, shutting and slipping away. ‘Left behind’ is the narrative frequently used for these places, but ‘fucked over’ is more accurate. What happens when a state treats a place as, at best, a problem, more often, with indifference and, at worst, with malign intent.

What was done to places like the community at this crossroads is not all they are. It doesn’t mean though, that people who live here don’t feel the pain this neglect causes to collective and individual psychology. Rundown buildings are the visible manifestation of an experience that burns into the mind of people across generations.

This is what affects middle class writers and photographers when they come somewhere like this. It’s alien to them, what others have gotten used to. When culture seekers and artists are attracted to inner-urban ‘grittiness’, they want visible vibrancy that’s rough around the edges, not people dealing as best they can with unglamorous multigenerational poverty. There’s too much edge for them here, without the soothing balm brought by street art or street food.

Perhaps such landscapes were unusual once, contained to a handful of areas that could be safely written off by the powers that be. These days, this abandonment of people and places creeps into everywhere in the UK, outside the gold-plated parts of the south east, as shops close and good jobs disappear. Now even some well-to-do areas are seeing their high streets decline. You can’t say though that the people who live at this crossroads didn’t warn them, but were told: too bad for you, but it couldn’t happen here.

Yet in the places where the new normal is the old normal, people still go on. Places where neighbours are the same for years, the families often outlasting the buildings in the cycles of clearance. Communities intertwined for decades. More so than in supposedly permanent rural idylls which have long become professional commuter towns. Those who remain somewhere that has dealt with large outward migration tend to be stoic about a place and each other.

What people don’t want in a place like this are more promises of grand gestures of change. Because most of the time, it doesn’t happen, and when it does, it’s usually indifferent to them and has often made things worse. Knocking down and rebuilding endlessly, but never really providing sustained investment in a community or addressing the lack of serious economic opportunities.

This crossroads is an amalgam of the decades: Victorian pubs, New Labour schools, 1980s bungalows, 1970s flats, 1990s petrol stations. It is not a place that’s dead though. It’s a place where the idea of catching a decent break can seem remote, but people go on. Despite the fucking over and the predominant media interest being poverty porn, people do their own rebuilding. The housing co-ops here: communities with well-built houses, plenty of green space and long waiting lists to move in. These sorts of places are often hated by much of the left and right though, neither fulfilling the nostalgic desire to have brave workers gratefully accepting their soaring new concrete wonderhomes from the paternalistic elite who designed them, nor the ruthless Home As Castle acquisition of your own thin slice of Faux Olde England. A working class which has its own ideas about what it wants is horrifying to many. As a result, their successes are ignored, and others don’t learn.

Yet, as local authorities crumble to bankruptcy, government action stumbles over the consequences of the last forty years, and the grass on sites of long demolished buildings grows high and unkept, perhaps now is the moment for those with their hands on the money and the cameras to hand them over. To those who have tried to exert positive change on their patch, despite everything. People who have ideas and skills, though are rarely given the opportunity to exercise them or to control resources. This place is the crossroads the UK stands at. The country has been here before and went a long way down a dark and now thoroughly broken path. The stakes are higher than ever. They need to learn from those who have had to deal with the mistakes of others for decades, and yet who still go on.

This piece was published by the Mechanics Institute Review, Birkbeck College, in October 2022.

Landmark

Kenn Taylor


An essay on a collabortive art project in Sheffield

Words: Kenn Taylor
Images: Shared Programme

Landmark is an art project created through collaboration between artists Emilie Taylor and Christopher Jarratt and eleven people they met at Project 6, a drug and alcohol support service.

On a baking hot day in Sheffield, I meet six of those eleven, Sam, Ben, Ruth, Matt, Lee and Dave. Along with Emilie and Christopher, who details the concept at the heart of the project: “We wanted to map and tell the stories of people’s journeys and moments of great change in their lives through the languages of imagery, colour and craft. Inspired by the symbolism from Sheffield’s past, we settled on pilgrim flasks and banners as the artefacts to hold and tell these stories.”

We meet in the yard of Yorkshire Artspace, with the pilgrim flasks laid out, their glazes glinting in the sun. I ask the group what they thought of these themes when they were presented with them. Lee says, “We were going in blind. But I like history, and the images shown by Chris and Emilie, the references were medieval, so I was quite happy with that. The broader context of us all going on a pilgrimage, that’s what we’ve done through this process.”

Christopher responds, “When we presented it, I did sense some hesitation, understandably so, but everyone got on board. Dealing with hard things in your life, if you can abstract them a bit, I think it helps. Embedding our stories into craft I feel is one of the most ancient and effective ways of making sense of the world.”

They met every Friday over 14 weeks, beginning each session talking about whatever came up for them, then drawing and printing in response. Lee details the impact this process had on them: “The most evocative part, drawing something every week, from our thoughts and feelings, opened up something new. That really connected us, was the glue that tied us in.”

After talking and drawing, they moved to creating objects. For the first seven weeks, they crafted the clay pilgrim flasks. For the remaining seven, they dyed and sewed large cloth pennants. 

Emilie says, “Making the drawings and letting what was under the surface speak could be emotionally deep and very heavy. Moving into material processes offered a way to sit with the weight of feeling in the room. Craft holds space. There were times, I remember dyeing the fabric after very difficult conversations, the mood transformed into all of us having an absolute riot.”

“We had big buckets. We did it as a communal thing,” Sam recalls. They tell me the wind was up the day they did the dyeing. Ruth points to the BBC building behind us, “we had visions of having to go to Radio Sheffield to get our flags back!”

Locations around the city that had significant meanings to individual group members became a focus as the project developed. They decided to dedicate one session to visiting places they’d each chosen. After arriving, they’d share what it meant to them and this was audio recorded. Later, footage was taken of the places and merged with the audio to create a film which forms part of the project.

It’s clear this revisitation of locations which held strong and sometimes painful memories had a significant impact on them. Ruth says, “My place was the Millennium Gallery; I went in again recently. It’s almost like it’s been exorcised from me, through this process. I used to only associate it with bad things, but it’s very different now for me.”

Dave agrees, “Like the park, I have found peace with it now. I go and sit at the bridge and listen to the running water. It’s that journey.”

The film is quietly meditative, its long, drawn out shots of the locations soundtracked by the group members’ heartfelt reflections. It creates an alternative map of the city through the lived experience of these individuals. Ben says of the final film, “Some of it was traumatic, but the sense of recovery and hope, that overrides any of that harrowing stuff. It was very honest, it needed to be spoken about.”

I ask about the images they chose for their flasks and banners. “I drew a wheelie bin full of empty wine bottles,” Ruth explains. “I never realised how much stress that would cause me during my addiction. I like to listen now when they empty my bin, it’s not the nosiest, not the heaviest on the street anymore. But I’d not dealt with that; it was still in there. This has aided my healing, to me forgiving myself.”

Ben says, “The symbols on my flask, I initially described them very matter of factly, they’re just magnifying glasses with eyes. Then someone said they’re quite surreal. And then I talked about how at the time I was under so much scrutiny with psychiatrists, and it links to being under that lens, stigmatised by society.”

Landmark is being exhibited in September 2022, Recovery Month, at Yorkshire Artspace and also on billboards across Sheffield. Emilie links this back to the original concept: “Pennants would have once hung from Sheffield Castle ramparts, welcoming travellers home. The flags of journeys travelled today will hang across the city on advertising hoardings.”

“For me what’s important about the banners being detached from the exhibition,” says Lee, “is if someone is driving past, they’ll be like ‘what’s that’, it will reach a far bigger audience.” The billboards will feature QR codes, to encourage people to find out more. “They will go on a journey with us. There’s a lot more to say,” he concludes.

I ask the group, looking back now, what difference they think the project has made to them. “I have grown and made myself well through this process,” Ben says. “Of course it’s been alongside therapy and other things I engage with, but this has helped no end.”

“I have a friend who has been supportive through my recovery,” Ruth says, “but doesn’t get it, me taking part in a project like this. Why would she. I didn’t get it either, before I came. It’s made me braver, to try new things. My confidence has grown.”

Christopher and Emilie collaborated with an existing community, one whose bonds were forged through the recovery process. Through this, a new temporary creative community was formed. I ask them both if they see initiating this formation as part of their artistic practice, alongside their creative skills. Christopher responds, “In short, yes. I want people to feel empowered and gain a sense of ownership over space and place through learning, skill sharing and creating work with a legacy and an inherent quality.”

Formally trained artists and those not formally trained coming together to share time, skills, knowledges and experiences and create something in collaboration, has a long tradition. It is given many different names, social practice, community art, etc, but the kernel of why it can be powerful is how it can carve a new space for all of those involved.

Exploring and exposing parts of your inner self through making art can be a challenging process. This can contribute to personal development and healing. But in creating these works around their experiences of recovery, the group have also opened up new channels for others engaging with the artworks to reflect on their own lives. Expanding communication across dividing lines. At a fundamental level, contributing to us understanding ourselves and each other better.

Lee says, “I have got hardened to the prejudice and the stigma; I can play out how it is going to go. It doesn’t define me as a person.” Those dealing with addiction, like many with less power in society, so often have their stories defined by others. Having access to your own forms of creative expression, being encouraged and given a platform for them, is essential in people being able to turn that around and speak directly of their own experiences to others. Doing this is a reclaiming of power. And it is partially because of how powerful this can be, that such access to creative expression is frequently denied and discouraged in people, one way or another.

The more you get used to expressing yourself, the more comfortable it can feel. Earlier steps though require bravery and often support. Chris unfolds some of the bright and bold banners that will soon be seen around Sheffield. I ask the group if they plan to carry on their creativity after Landmark. There is a chorus of agreement. Two members of the group have recently enrolled in degrees, influenced by taking part in the project.

“It’s reawakened in me a passion I have always had for art,” Ben says enthusiastically. “I will definitely be continuing the journey.”

Lee agrees, “I have started to write poems again and I have carried that on. It’s a nice creative process for me and I don’t think I would have done that if it wasn’t for this project.”

Dave sums up, “We’re waiting for the next one.”

This piece was commisioned and published as part of the Landmark collabortive art project which took place over eight months in 2021-22. The outcomes from the project where exhibited in Yorkshire Artspace and around Sheffield in September 2022. You can download the exhibition catalouge below.

Landmark brochureDownload

On cardigans, accents and mis-shapes

Kenn Taylor

By Kenn Taylor

But you don’t sound like you’re from Merseyside?
So you’ve lost your accent?
Did you go to a good school then?

I am tired of these questions. Every one of which is laced with prejudice and projection, even if those asking don’t intend it. Aside from any personal frustration at them, what’s more important is they illustrate some of the skewed perceptions that many middle-class people have in their encounters with working-class people.

Whilst my accent isn’t the strongest going, it is the one I have had my whole life. A mixture, not untypical, of my mum’s Liverpudlian, my dad’s Lancastrian, and me growing up in an overspill estate of Birkenhead—a place where accents range from the strongest ‘Scouse’ to basically exactly how I sound, varying even from door to door.

These questions first came up when I went to university locally in Liverpool and were almost always from middle-class students from the south. Many couldn’t seem to grasp that in a metropolitan area of 1.5 million people, there is both variation and commonality in speech and accent that comes from a complex mix of cultures and migration. This confounded their media-driven expectations about the area and its people. When years later I moved away for work, living all over the country and working for predominantly middle- to upper-class cultural organisations, such questions became even more common, and were often asked after just meeting someone.

I found these questions most often came from people who’d spent the least amount of time in Merseyside, yet considered themselves for some reason to be experts on how people from the region sounded—as well as on what the ‘local character’ was. Many would, without invitation, want to share their thoughts on this with me.

More interestingly, I noticed it became something to challenge me on: ‘But you’re not really a Scouser’, I was told, though this was something I never claimed to be—nevermind that what a Scouser is in reality is pretty ambiguous anyway. Especially when the dockland communities that Scouse culture emerged from were as much in towns like Bootle and Birkenhead more so  than suburban parts of Liverpool itself. As well as this, many dockland communities were moved from riverside neighbourhoods to new towns and housing estates miles inland, often in different boroughs and counties. In short, as those of us with personal experience know, working class and regional identities, accents, and cultures are complex and multi-layered. Many people do not want to engage with this though, because it confounds their comfortable assumptions.

The challenge implicit in this question, of course, is the assumption that being ‘Scouse’ has a particular form and characteristic, an ‘other’ that can easily be defined by someone else based on the signifier of an accent. This challenge was often accompanied by follow-up questions like: ‘So were you middle class then?’ or ‘So you went to a good school?’ I answered, for context, no to both. My dad was a railway fitter and my mum a cleaner and we lived in a working-class community. My dad became disabled and couldn’t work so I grew up largely on benefits, eligible for free school-meals et al. I went to a bog standard secondary modern school and worked for a couple of years before attending Liverpool John Moores University, as the first person in my family to enter higher education. Yet merely because my accent didn’t fit some people’s expectations around class and regional identity, I would often find my experience and identity being interrogated.

After such encounters, I often asked myself why I should have to explain any of this? Why do people feel entitled to ask such prying questions and make such statements, especially in a professional context? When you are usually just trying to respond quickly to the initial common question, ‘Where are you from then?’ why should you have to make the effort to satisfy their curiosity? A curiosity which, in reality, is about whether I and indeed other working-class people and people from Merseyside conform, or not, to their prejudices and assumptions. But you are judged too if you don’t want to respond to such questions or take issue with them. 

All this is a demonstration of the boxes that many middle- and upper-class people put working-class people in: a projection of what they want and expect from working-class people. The working class, it is assumed, have thick accents. Being from Liverpool, it is assumed, means being working class, whereas being from, say York, means being middle class. This is, of course, nonsense. Liverpool has middle-class suburbs, a significant professional sector, five universities. York meanwhile has a working class hit hard by the decline of local manufacturing and high property prices because of tourism and gentrification. However, if you don’t fulfil the stereotypes of what more privileged people consider to be working class or what people from a particular place are like, your identity and culture is questioned by those who have no real experience of it.

Academia and the cultural sector are rife with this. Because class is almost always viewed through a bourgeois lens, it is seen on their terms, as something they can define based on their own prejudices about the dress, accent, behaviour, etc. of working-class people. Some like the idea of having a bit of a working-class presence in their organisations. Yet they often only want and value working-class people who ‘fit the mould’ as they perceive it. That working-class people are as varied and complex as middle-class people, and so are their accents and cultures, is something many do not want to engage with.

This seriously impacts on the opportunities afforded to working-class people and how they are judged and treated within bourgeois and elite structures. Indeed, it even impacts on what stories are allowed to be told within culture. A working-class writer from Liverpool who wants to do something set in the region but whose work is not suitably ‘gritty’ to fit the bourgeois imagination of the place will usually have a hard time getting it told through most mainstream mediums. In contrast, witness the visceral critical reaction to Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (Morace, 2001, p.11) when it was first published. In part because it showed a side of pretty Edinburgh that many people, residents and visitors alike, would rather pretend didn’t exist.

There is no better anthem about class, prejudice, and performativity, than Pulp’s ‘Common People’. Its vitriol about an upper-class student trying to act out what they perceived as working-class behaviour because they thought it was ‘cool’, was sparked by someone Jarvis Cocker met at art school—a type of encounter now less likely as arts schools have become further dominated by people from privileged backgrounds (Romer, 2018). It illustrates Cocker’s genius that in a three-minute pop anthem he can say more than most of us in a thousand essays.

Less remarked on, is the also brilliant ‘Mis-Shapes’, from the same album (Cocker et al., 1995): We don’t look the same as you / And we don’t do the things you do / But we live around here too.

This too is an angry and danceable song about being ‘different’ in a working-class context, because being working class is not about conforming to a narrow set of stereotypes set by others: a particular accent, a way of dressing or behaving. As Cocker exudes in Mis-Shapes, being working class doesn’t mean you have to be, as we said around ours, a ‘bad scall’. And of course, there are plenty of bad scalls in the middle and upper classes too.

This issue goes beyond accent. At a conference I attended, talk of class prompted someone to rant about how there were working-class people in the arts, they just needed to throw off the cardigans they wore to fit in. ‘You have nothing to lose but your knitwear’ perhaps? I realised, as they were speaking, that I was wearing a cardigan and considered momentarily, if this made me a reactionary class traitor. Then I remembered that my mum, who spent her working life as a cleaner and in factories, also liked a nice cardi, and  how popular it was, in the  football casual fashions in the North that I’d grown up around, to re-appropriate middle-class knitwear styles and brands—often to the horror and confusion of those who were used to wearing them. Cardigans and class were again just as complex as accents.

Never having had money for decent clothes when I was young, the first thing I did when I got my first decent paying, albeit insecure, job in my mid-twenties was to go and buy a smart overcoat that I’d long coveted. Wanting to look sharp is far from class treachery. And when you have often had little, being able to own ‘something nice’, even if it is singular, can cover up for a lack of security in general. ‘Oxfam chic’ meanwhile is often favoured mainly by those who like to try and ‘slum it’ in the same mould as the student in ‘Common People’ and others who engage in the performance of what they see as being working class. As Nathalie Olah discusses in Steal As Much As You Can (2019): ‘Cosplaying as the working class is one such method used by the middle-class ascendants to the highest ranks of the media, advertising and art institutions. Disguising their own privilege by wearing tracksuits and talking in mockney accents.’ (p.158)

Meanwhile, if you’re rebelling against working-class conventions, which can be just as restrictive and repressive as middle-class ones, then engaging and playing with elite-controlled aspects of culture can be interesting and alluring. Even if you far from swallow them wholesale. As a teenager in the 1990s, I was inspired by the Manic Street Preachers, as they demonstrated that being working class didn’t mean you had to limit your tastes or interests. Nor if you became interested in other things, did you have to abandon popular culture. They showed that grappling with the ideas and the language that is used to control you and turning them to your own ends, is the opposite of class betrayal.

Some view as a burden the feelings of ‘in betweenness’ that can emerge when you have working-class origins but end up with a level of education most working-class people are denied. However, I take the view that these feelings can be powerful. As noted by Lee Crooks (2020) in his abstract for the Working Class Academics Conference:“my capacity to inhabit – and slip between – the environs of the campus and the everyday spaces of the city beyond, I argue, provides a basis for creative transgression, doing things differently and scope for a healthy injection of working-class counter-culture, collective solidarity and humour. At the same time, this feeling of being ‘out-of-place’ and not knowing my place to some extent frees me from the conventional norms and expectations of what a university academic should do and be.”

Something echoed by Chloe Maclean (2020) at the same conference: “a cleft habitus [a feeling that ‘this is not the place for me’] is not solely a site of dislocation, but can be utilised as a resource to challenge the reproduction of hierarchies within an institution.”  

Much of the middle- and upper-class who dominate the culture sector and academia, do not want to grasp these complexities, viewing class as a principally visual and sonic set of signifiers that they can easily pick out and identify. This creates serious issues. As the current push to increase working-class representation gathers pace, there’s a risk that recruiters and commissioners will go for what they perceive to be ‘obviously’ working-class candidates. Excluding those who don’t fit the mould, they might reject a young, working-class LGBTQIA+ candidate who doesn’t have an ‘urban’ accent and doesn’t dress or behave in a way they perceive as working class. This highlights the absolute importance of having working-class people in senior management, decision-making, and commissioning roles in these sectors, not just junior or public-facing positions, or as token artists, outreach staff, or lecturers. As well as this, organisations need to seriously measure the socio-economic background of their workforces and job applicants to identify how representative, or unrepresentative, they are of society. Of course, it needs to be acknowledged that these issues are intersectional and such challenges will be disproportionately worse for people who face other forms of prejudice and stereotyping on top of class prejudice.

Issues around this could also grow now that, like in the 1990s, but in contrast to the last twenty years, being working class is becoming trendy again. Where once ‘chav’ was bandied about as an everyday insult for things not cool, now ‘bougie’ is slung about instead. Where this is dangerous for the working class, is in the inevitability of the adoption and performance of what are perceived as working-class tropes by middle- and upper-class people by those desperate not to be seen as unfashionable and longing for what they perceive as ‘authenticity’. Through this co-option and crass distortion of working-class cultures, we would also see the exclusion of more nervous, more insecure, less supported working-class voices. As noted by Olah: ‘this fetishisation only makes class divisions more entrenched, by further pushing the working-class experience into the realm of morbid spectacle.’ (p. 108) Not only does this deny opportunities to people who are actually from working-classbackgrounds, it reduces their experiences and cultural expressions to a cartoon copy.

Perhaps more optimistically, this change in fashion could indicate a lower social tolerance for bourgeois norms. Yet the trouble about being in fashion is that being working class is likely to go out of fashion again eventually, with an attendant loss of opportunities. It reminds me a little of George Orwell (2013) writing about the anarchist takeover of Barcelona in the 1930s: ‘In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist … Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform …. I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.’

Middle- and upper-class people need to be reminded of their prejudices and assumptions, and perhaps in the current climate they’re more likely to listen. Key to change though is ensuring that more working-class people take up space in positions of power in culture and academia. Then there needs to be a constant renewal of this through continued recruitment so that the numbers of working-class people in these sectors grow and expand through their hierarchies. Rather thanjust a token handful of working-class people brought in temporarily when there is a moral panic or it’s found to be trendy, who thenoften find themselves, in their relative isolation, up against a wall of established thought and behaviour. Change must come from outside as well, but without more working-class people in the permanent institutions of culture as well, any lasting change will be much harder.

We have to make sure the new drive towards working-class opportunity and representation truly platforms the working classes in all their diversity and complexity. That it is members of the working classes who get the opportunities to tell their own stories, not have them re-framed, twisted or co-opted by others to enhance themselves.

As it says in Mis-Shapes:
We want the things you won’t allow us
We won’t use guns, we won’t use bombs
We’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of—that’s our minds

This piece was published in issue 10 of Lumpen journal in June 2022

Reference list

Banks, N., Cocker, J., Doyle, C., Mackey, S., Senior, R., Webber, M. (1995). Mis-Shapes. Retrieved from: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/pulp/misshapes.html

Crooks, L. (2020). ‘One of our own?’ On being a working class, hometown academic. Retrieved from: https://workingclass-academics.co.uk/abstracts/#LeeCrookesAb

Maclean, C. (2020). Rise with your class, not out of your class: Auto-ethnographic reflections on imposter syndrome and class conflict in higher education. Retrieved from: https://workingclassacademics.co.uk/abstracts/#ChloeMacleanAb

Morace, R. (2001). Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting: A Reader’s Guide. London, England: Continuum.

Olah, N. (2019). Steal as Much as You Can. London, England: Repeater.

Orwell, G. (2013). A State of Affairs Worth Fighting For. Retrieved from http://bookanista.com/orwells-spanish-civil-war/

Romer, C. (2018). Specialist arts colleges are among the most elitist in the country. Retrieved from: https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/news/specialist-arts-colleges-among-most-elitist-country