Coalbrookdale by Night' 1801 by Philip de Loutherbourg. Science Museum.
If this particular work has come to symbolise the birth of the Industrial Revolution in Britain for me, then is there such a painting that represents the death and subsequent consequences of it?
Such a painting if it exists would surely be a very British painting too because broadly speaking the repercussions of that encapsulation in this work spread the world over and yet peace has come to reign here. Gone are town sized sites of blast furnaces; coke ovens and everything that emanates from them, or indeed feeds them, and redundant are the people who’s lives were made and made miserable by whatever particular brand of trade formed an intrinsic key to the myriad manufacturing processes within to form the whole.
As modern industry now generally contains itself within enormous bland corrugated sheds on meticulously planned Industrial estates, and the fast acreage of land once given to visible industrial processes and the vast waste it subsequently produced; (likening it all to photographs of the brutal destruction in war zones) – the regeneration and greening of these lands that once were epic stages of fire and manufacture (growing the consumerist monster by furnishing a demand created across world and empire) have now restored a peace and calm to the formerly scorched, pockmarked and carved landscape whose entire contribution to the economic fortunes of whichever British city can now be focussed to a miniscule remnant that can simply allude to, or encapsulates the past overwhelming investment of resources, politics and turmoil that once was with a monument; a symbol. A token of acknowledgement in the form of a frozen moment; a single coal truck; a pit wheel, an assemblage of cogs perhaps!
Where a significant event claimed a tally of dead and maimed perhaps a statue has been fashioned - rigid in a pose significant to the former animation of the trade it transponds to.
Where the industry died or was killed off by politics or globalism, the old, proud, scarred and maimed were left with the remnants. Where the money moved on, as money inevitably does to reinvent itself, we are left with the monuments.
If I could, or should, or ever need to encapsulate an explanation of my painted work, the results of which are sifted through my ‘walks' and ongoing observations of post-industrial Stoke-On-Trent, then what better explanation of my shapes; forms and content than the land tied down and strung across with the Architecture of humanity captured for the purpose of Industrial Endeavour.
Terraced Housing.
Whilst wonderful former Art School Buildings; Cemetery Chapels, former Victorian factory works buildings and magnificent Town Halls dot this conurbation and Country throughout, in my mind these Civic celebrations are the false gods, if you will. The Statues, the marble interiors of the town halls and the terracotta embellishments, the expensive hand painted tiles are the work of the underclass and the subjugated by and large. So it is not the celebratory, not the iconic showcase of expense (in every sense; monetary and in human life) for the advertisement of, and ‘celebration' of ‘Pride’ that matter for this project – it is the voices and recollections that emanate from the ‘Architecture of the poor.’
Far be it for me to try and tell anybody about the history of the terraced house! It is extensively documented in the annals of British Industrial history and the social documentaries of Working Class British history but these ‘machines for living in' are where my family story originates.
Stoke-On-Trent is in my blood whether I want it in there or not! My Mother and Father come from two adjoining districts; my Father from Northwood and my Mother from Birches Head. Two streets apart and accessible by a short walk down through an entry that intersect the rows of terraced housing that make up the overall neighbourhood.
My Father is the son of a butcher and pottery worker; James (Jim) and Hilda, with one sibling- a brother named James. My Mother is the daughter of a soldier (and bus conductor after the Second World War) and an accountant; Albert and Ada, and also had one sibling- a sister named Cynthia.
My Mother and Father speak of great family memories; lively characters in the extended family's of both and strictly structured but hugely happy childhoods respectively. Similarly, both had big extended family's comprising mostly of women working in the vast pottery industry. Their respective memories are rooted in the local streets and neighbourhood, and my Father recollects that he first set eyes on the girl that later become my Mother, at Sunday School in the church a mere stones throw away from the family home on Mount Street.
When thinking about my family history I always thought that it was my father that broke the mould to travel in the name of work and career, escaping the smoke of industrial Stoke-On-Trent to work, firstly in London, and then further still to an overseas posting – but his Grandmother before him, according to a vague story, had walked the distance from Ayr in Scotland down to ‘the potteries', but not a great deal it seems is known beyond that. Whether it was one individual, or a family group that embarked on an epic trek; completed in one journey, or broken into incremental segments and periodic stays in different places perhaps looking for meaningful employment along the way and then culminating in the arrival and setting up of the family in Stoke-On-Trent upon more opportunity within a burgeoning pottery industry is not known specifically. It is however a historical known that migration across and around the UK in the times of the Industrial Revolution happened, and a similar story happens on his Father's side, only non specific to any individual but a given that the origin of the Pearsall name comes from The Black Country. Individuals originating from two travelling families meet in Stoke-On-Trent.
The only individual in the immediate family whose lineage is directly from Stoke-On-Trent is my Mother's Father Albert who is a Burslem man; one of eight children (Seven sisters.) My Grandmother is from Bishop Auckland. It is through the Industrial Revolution that the strands of my family history are fashioned into two settled families amidst the streets of ‘The Potteries’ from whom my parents met and started their own story; beginning in the streets of Northwood and Birches Head and which continues today having passed through the dying embers of the British Empire in Africa; in Salisbury in Rhodesia where my story begins, and back again full circle to a small terraced house in Joiner's Square where they both live today.
It is a small joy to hear my parents speak of their childhood. Their faces light up and animate; they confirm facts; names, specific streets and mutual interactions with characters-in-common - look at each other at shared recollections with eyes that glint with an unbreakable love still, of a coming together and the subsequent embarkation into a shared adventure. Having now spent more time together on an adventurous life than the time before they met and married. Having said that; they effectively grew up together - they've always known each other's being there in the same territory, growing up in the same neighbourhood. Spotting each other in a church congregation or through the school railings. They speak of places that are consigned to historical legend; playing on the spoil heaps of what is now the tranquillity of Forest Park – back then an industrial scar created from both Hanley Deep Pit and Shelton Bar. Summer days ‘down the Sandy' – countryside at the bottom of Northwood, stretching over to Abbey Hulton, through which the Cauldon Canal snakes, and the railway line from Leek, and collieries sliced through. The Sandy as an area still exists, but it has become a forest on the edges of new housing estates either side. The railway line has trees growing through the rails, but the canal boasts a wildlife wonderland and cuts as it always did; one way to Leek and beyond, and the other direction silently through the city, meeting the Trent and Mersey Canal at Etruria. They speak of extreme winters on hard, steep streets where there were very few cars. Snowdrifts as high as the houses, pushed by the winds through the long streets. They speak warmly of memorable relatives – Uncle Josh's yard; teachers at school, friends and mutual friends. People are long gone, or scattered. As regards the streets themselves- nothing much has changed. The brick has aged more; modern life has encroached; TV aerials and satellite dishes, double glazed windows and breeze block extensions. The Entry's, once childhood kingdoms and gang territories are gated off now and are the domain for quiet and characterless wheelie bins. The cobbles have been dug up and tarmacked over in most part. What remains is the memories, if only tenuously these days .. waiting to be lost, or diluted. The tales of the Rag and Bone man's horse – the Dray Horses; the watercress man and the milk man.
This is where the essence of my work is. Importantly, my work is not about nostalgia; it's not my work to have smoke coming out of chimneys where they still exist but the fire has long gone out.
I do not remember the fog nor smell of smoke that consumed these streets, although I had been here before the Clean Air Act put paid to every industry that had not evolved to meet the legislation, I do not remember it through baby eyes. The storylines in my work reflect two principle sources. Splintered memories that have etched themselves into my subconscious and impressions I have soaked up from my continued walks throughout the city. I am absorbed by what is left. I am absorbed by the marks and signs that the past has left. The bricks that remain black from the smoke that swirled around them. I am interested by what is left after the fire.
My work is Post-Industrial. If you see fire then it has embraced fantasy.
I remember, most of all, standing on the broken stones at the top of the entry that started midway up Boulton Street – the street that my Mother's parents lived on – and being in awe of the two giant, black painted gable ends there, and the row of garages constructed individually to their respective owners means, that sat between them. Immediately around the corner from off the street one slipped between the end garage and the gable wall and descended down into the cobbled entry itself, forward between two end houses back to back and onto Turner Street. Across Turner Street there was an alleyway parallel between two houses which we slipped between and descended down a narrow path past a post that stood there amidst the waste ground between two streets of houses, back to back. The exit came out on Mount Street, where we would turn right and go up the street whilst crossing the road. Diagonally from that exit was the house of my Father's parents, where he grew up. That walk, to me encapsulates the feelings of where we come from, and the history of my family; intertwined with the history of working class Britain. I also have to remember that the lives of my parents and their parents before them were not only shaped by working class history but by the First and Second World Wars in which members of my family were both immediate participants; at the forefront of the conflict on the European Continent, and on the Home front. Living in the City of a major steelworks put them in the line of the bombings and they are tangible memories.
In some respects I very much feel like an outsider looking in. My personal ‘Alice in Wonderland' moment – the ‘entry's being the rabbit hole. A world that I am connected to but is not mine.
It is akin to dipping a toe into a history that I am part of, yet I do not carry the weight of it's association with me across the plain of my life's journey. Once I had made the decision to commit to the path that took me in this direction, from the choice that had been offered to me at the crossroad of being Sixteen years old and having finished school, my Father told me quite simply that once I had arrived in the UK alone that I would be judged on my family background, and that was a working class one. It was the very first time that I learned of what is inescapably intrinsic to the social fabric in Britain. Despite the rhetoric of politicians whom have said that we are now a classless society – we are most definitely not, and we all carry where we come from on our backs and are judged by it for so long as we are on this island. My overriding observation from having made the choice to live here is that everyone knows where they come from, and what class they are – and they then spend their lives carrying it or burying it for necessity.
The second source of inspiration in my industrial oeuvre is Industry itself. People and the clock machine of the factory. Having travelled reasonably extensively around Britain I do marvel at the imposition of the Industrial Revolution on the country. It's story is in the opulence of stately homes I’ve visited through my membership of the National Trust from one perspective, and on council estates and mining community estates I've passed through and walked around with door to door sales companies I've worked for as extensively as Liverpool; Manchester, London, Nottingham, Birmingham, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Glasgow, Redcar, Telford, Winsford and of course Stoke-On-Trent- and these places are tough, with few frills. I've worked in the pottery industry as a labourer. I've worked in industries that supplied the raw materials to the pottery industry doing the same; memorably, Jesse Shirley, importers of animal bones from Europe to grind into the mix for bone china. The jobs were tough and the people are tough too. There's not a shred of sentiment nor love for the work, just the relentless necessity for the continuity and the money. As is always relevant is the reliance on demand in the marketplace at home or across the globe. Empires have been built over years and then disappeared overnight. In Burslem, Stoke-On-Trent a museum was being built to showcase the wonders of the local ceramic industry and during that time Royal Doulton announced it was moving production to the Far East. The doors never opened. What was built gradually decayed into an eyesore in the middle of a town that had been the Mother Town of pottery production for the previous two-hundred years. I see people walking home from work through these streets and I see the story.
That is the story.
That I feel like an outsider looking in, as I mentioned earlier, is perhaps why I've taken to representing on the paper, courtesy of a small but significant enough incursion; a mere touch of that life to acknowledge being a part of that which adds a certain ‘authentication’ to the work, to validate it in some small way – to have lifted some light from blackened streets of repetitious, functional houses in long lines, and grids that flow over the contours of the geography of regions under which the men toiled in the earth a mile down. Men I know and have spoken to whom started their descent into the Pit as I started my journey through art college, and then Polytechnic, but whom I should meet in a different industry at a different time of our lives that compelled me to put paint to paper and represent them and my family like them in the black of time.
We are united by history.
