Between 1975 and 1987, photographers Chris Killip and Graham Smith turned their cameras on England’s industrial north. Their work covered Skinningrove, Tyneside, Middlesbrough, and Co Durham — regions where steelworks, shipyards, and coal mines had defined daily life for generations. By the time Killip and Smith were shooting, those industries were collapsing fast.
The two photographers didn’t shoot from a distance. They embedded themselves in these communities, documenting the texture of ordinary life — doorsteps, pub back rooms, snow-covered streets, and the long shadows cast by pit heads and furnaces.
One of the most direct images from this period shows a furnace worker at the Clay Lane Ironworks in Middlesbrough. Titled “Thirty-Eight Bastard Years on the Furnace Front,” the 1983 photograph shows him sitting alone in the mess room, a mug on the table, his gaze fixed downward. He was 62 years old. The British Steel Corporation was offering buyouts at the time, and he applied for redundancy. He was refused — management considered his experience too valuable to release him.
Across Middlesbrough’s South Bank, the same economic pressure shaped street corners and living rooms alike. Killip and Smith recorded it all — from the people gathered at the giro corner to families packed together on Boxing Day.
In Lynemouth and Skinningrove, the industrial backdrop was equally stark. Terraced housing sat directly beside collieries, and residents lived within sight and sound of the machinery that employed them — or had recently stopped doing so.
Children appear throughout the work — playing, spinning hula-hoops, living alongside the industrial wreckage their parents navigated. Their presence gives the photographs a specific weight: these were not dying places in the abstract, but living communities with futures at stake.
