St Helens

Abstract

Stephen Clarke was born in the Lancashire town of St Helens. His extended family, from his parent’s generation back, worked in the town’s major industries: collieries and glassworks. In 1982/83 when Clarke photographed St Helens only two of its coal mines remained in operation, both on their way to closure; and Pilkington, the largest of the glass manufacturers – and a name still synonymous with the town – had halved its local workforce in the face of recession and global competition.

The fabric of the town’s nineteenth century housing and its shopping centre – modernised in the late 1960s and early ‘70s – was typical to 1980s northern Britain. Slum clearance programmes left sections of red brick terraces propped up on wastelands of rubble to co-exist with new housing and concrete commercial precincts. Today the street sign that announces Hope Close is battered but retains as a backdrop the same terraced house with its now partially bricked up window.

The St Helens pictures were taken with Clarke’s first 35mm SLR camera bought for him by his grandfather and father. Aged twenty, Clarke was unused to handling a camera and was unfamiliar with the history of photography or the genre of social documentary. His visual references were formalism and graphic components, particularly text, within painting. This initial exploration of place through photography laid the foundations for Clarke’s ongoing photographic practice. What it represents, significantly, is an end point: a severance with a familial place and a way of life that had defined previous generations. [A version of this abstract was written by Julia Garcia Hernandez and published as the Introduction to St Helens.]

St Helens was published by Café Royal Books in an edition of 150. It was edited by Craig Atkinson, founder of Café Royal Books.