Britain – What Lies Ahead

I’ve been spending many rather dreary hours recently retouching my black and white pictures from Hull in the late 70s and early 80s, including this image of the Humber Estuary, taken looking towards Hull from New Holland.

© 1981, Peter Marshall

It’s one of several hundred images I’ve recently rescanned and am working on before making a final selection for my next Blurb book, ‘Still Occupied, A View of Hull’, which will include images made between around 1975 and 1985. This is only one of a number of pictures I took of the channels in the Humber mud, though most were on the other side of the estuary.  This was made before the Humber Bridge opened, and we’d taken the ferry from Hull across the river. There wasn’t an awful lot to do on the other side – we could have taken a train to Grimsby, but decided against it, just walked around, took a few pictures and got on the ferry back.

This particular image is a distant vista of Hull, clearly recognisable on the far shore, but I also liked the crossing of the two gullies; most of the images I took showed single channels going out through the mud towards the distant water. One such image, taken by Vanessa Winship, who grew up a short distance upstream at Barton-upon-Humber, heads the FT Feature ‘Britain: what lies ahead?‘, in which she is one of ten photographers with connections to different parts of the country who were “asked to give us a glimpse of what the future might hold.”

Unfortunately, unless you subscribe to the FT you won’t be able to see the slide shows of their images, although you can read what they say and follow the links to their web pages, although the images that Winship took when she went back to her old school don’t appear to be either there or on her blog.  In the FT she writes that as a child she could look out of her bedroom river and see the lights on the other side – Hull – and would imagine that it was the end of the world.

I only crossed on the Humber ferry a couple of times, though I saw it many times arriving and leaving at the pier in Hull – perhaps even with Winship on board, travelling to college in Hull. Shortly after I took the picture above the Humber bridge opened, and the ferry stopped running, and I walked across the river to Barton. I’ve written previously in Sweet Nothings about Winship’s fine portraits of schoolgirls from eastern Anatolia.

Another familiar image on the accessible page of the FT came to me on a Christmas card from it’s author, John Davies and shows a scrap yard in front of a power station on the Mersey at Widnes. What you can’t see from the thumbnail on the FT page is that there is a St George’s flag flying above the top of the heap of metal in the middle-ground of the picture, put there by workers to mark their support of England in the 2010 World Cup.

The same picture appears in the ‘In Progress’ section of Davies’s web site,  and clicking on the link there takes you to a larger version and more information about this ongoing project “into the impact of waste disposal, landfill sites and recycling plants in North West England.”

Other photographers who feature in the FT article are Martin Parr, Patricia & Angus Macdonald, Simon Roberts, Simon Norfolk, Jem Southam, Hannah Starkey and Donovan Wylie.

I’m not sure that the piece as a whole has a great deal of insight into the state of the nation and its future, although perhaps some at least of the photographers appear to have a greater purchase on reality than  the FT’s comment and analysis editor Alec Russell who introduces the feature and reminds me that FT does after all stand for Fairy Tales.  I’m not sure that a world run by photographers would really be a good idea, but it could be a whole lot better than one run by bankers and economists.

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