Journey (Ulendo)

  

    There are days, only every so often, when I wake in the morning having snapped sharply out of an all consuming dream; a mash of memories from 'The Land of the Lake' - a childhood in Malawi to which the soundtrack of fish eagles screaming is intensely commensurate to the experience.

 Unforgettable.

 
    Even in a dream it is just as heart stoppingly intense as the last day I heard it. It is a sound that cuts rapier-sharp through the moment, like the memory of it cuts through my present reality.  

Once heard, never forgotten. It's power never diluted.

 
     In the beautiful quiet of the early morning, I am sitting in the shade on a blue sun lounger that is parked on a perfectly manicured lawn up from a soft sandy beach that slopes under the gentle waves of a beautiful blue freshwater lake.
     I'm wearing my swimming trunks and wearing a straw hat. Across to my right is the consistent and rhythmic tsk tsk tsk tsk of a lawn sprinkler, and further back, behind me are the gentle sounds of cutlery chinking and glasses chiming collectively as a large table is being laid for breakfast on the tiled veranda. To the left of me, over a short stretch of lawn and just behind the hedge, a boabab tree towers above all around in a quite spectacular fashion - it's volume of immense proportions.
    Slowly, but steadily, the Adults are arising from their nightly slumber and small conversations are being made whilst iced and freshly squeezed orange juice is being poured. The smell of fresh coffee drifts across the lawn - although, at the age I am, I'm not yet a coffee drinker, although it is part of the vocabulary of social events.
   Already creeping up the lawn toward me is a dividing line between the cool dark of the shade and the ferocious intensity of the sun.
    A voice calls out that breakfast is now ready. Once all seated around the table,  Grace is offered to a God that may or may not be aware of this microcosm of expatriate life on the shores of the ninth largest freshwater lake in the World. An estimated Two Million year old lake, although more recent evidence suggests a basin forming some Eight Million years ago where the East African Rift of two split tectonic pieces allowed it's formation.

    But what do I know?
In this dream I've been transported back to life as it was when I was Twelve years old.

  After the sociability of breakfast, the morning slows down to stop. The heat of the day slowly rises, and the silence matches the pace required to coexist with the heat.

                                 A silence to be shattered by the fish eagle's scream. 

                                             That is my sound of Africa above all else.

Lake Malawi : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Malawi
Malawi : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malawi

                       
                    'Journey'
 at The Soden Collection in Shrewsbury.
OPENS Saturday 23rd July until Saturday 13th August
https://sodencollection.com

Journey in Print

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/flowerboxorguk

#Scar: from the Rich Earth

         On the ground floor of the City Museum & Art Gallery in Hanley there is a room that I never quite saw the point of when I first visited as a young boy, but which was fascinating nevertheless; full of odd rocks and lifeless stuffed animals!  It's relevance within a museum full of pottery was initially lost on me but I didn't question it back then aged five - I just thought it quirky.  
        The story illustrated in this darkened room told of ancient swamps in the area of a stunted global landscape - pre-continental shifts - hinting at a Britain-shaped land mass conjoined to Europe (Topical ?)    In the midst of all that a region which will be Stoke-On-Trent at some future time, but beyond comprehension as yet. The early 1970's looked nothing like the Middle Paleolithic period tableaux in the museum complex laid out before me - I struggled with this room!
       I suppose I didn't get the point because the number-crunching involved in the great passage of time it illustrates is mind-blowing; but it might as well be just the other week in the greater scheme of things with regard to planet Earth's known existence, and wrapped up in the history of time itself to boot!
      
      The room is still exactly the same today,  but obviously it all makes sense now.
      It all begins with a huge map at the entrance to this room, the natural history section.

      The map is the Mineral Map & Section of the North Staffordshire Coalfield, 'shewing the outcrops of the Various Seams or Strata of Coal & Ironstone.'  I can imagine now; a small smoky office cramped with the presence of heavy coated, top hatted men poring over this comprehensive map wide-eyed with the vision of the potential spoils lying beneath this local earth, and the vast wealth creating possibilities to a grasping gamut of heavy industries operating on the surface, to which these men belonged -  rapidly seducing people off working the land and into the black, grimy filth of dim streets and long hours of harsh unforgiving and life-shortening labour. The Stoke-On-Trent of my fore-fathers no less.

     My particular interpretation of this map prompted me immediately to title this next phase of my work #Scar; for it is, in visual terms, exactly that - an industrial 'scar' across the green and pleasant rural history of Stoke-On-Trent.
     Looking at the map objectively it forms in the mind a conclusion; that which tells us that this city, this conurbation of six highly individual towns, came to being solely from the processes of industry. Coal, Pottery and Steel. It was never a pretty picture from any angle. It starts with wholesale exploitation from the very beginnings; of the land, and ultimately of the people who worked it. What came from here enriched the world.

       Stoke-On-Trent was literally born out of the earth and made with fire!

     The idea of the scar cemented further when I first broached the concept with Dave Harper and Mike Cain, known in team form as The Penkhull Artists Association.
     
       Mike recalled a time in the Seventies when he walked down Basford Bank toward Hanley and was awestruck by the industrial panjandrum within the Etruria valley, occupied primarily with the spectacle of Shelton Bar and Etruria Gasworks. Dave in parallel was exploring a phase in his work concerning strata; layers, lines, textures from nature, colour and contrasts.

       #Scar was born.

      Honestly and shamefully, the work of the Penkhull Artist's Association is a body to which I was curious to only by a passing glance on a particularly busy day - an exhibition I passed through without looking properly. Furthermore I chanced across the website not long after without diving the full depth.
      Now I am fully immersed. It is what I saw in those glimpses; I see primitive forces in slabs of deep rich colours encased in honey-thick glazes, shining from deep within like a kaleidoscope trapped in amber. The primary vehicle is a square slab-made dish of sublime proportions. Heavy in thickness; solid with all the gravity of reason. With it's decoration it delivers mass. Force. Each is highly individual, like tracks on a definitive album - akin to all the instruments in recording one particular track being put away afterwards and another, radically differing set appears, mastering different disciplines to write and record the next; comfortably resonating next to each other as a whole but still resolutely absolute in their individuality.
       Being privileged enough to see a great many all together in one place as the pieces come together prior to selection for this exhibition, I think that any prospective buyer could panic in the instance of having to select the piece to take home. They work collectively as a choir in a cacophony of creative volume, but as an owner of an individual work let me reassure - it sings most beautifully on it's own.

      Rebecca Perry is our quiet delight! Her work is split into two camps. Firstly; bold, fresh, innovative, shocking perhaps and tantalisingly ambiguous! Lucky me to be invited into the depths of her sketchbooks - they confirm resolute lines of direction drawn extensively from intuitive enquiry - a mind open to the vastness of exploration and influence leaving no possibility ignored it seems.
       Secondly, she's very technical: Professional in clay choices, and ghe science of it all - she's articulate and confident, knows why her decisions are made in resolving the brief she sets herself - she knows what she wants her material choices to achieve and her creative instincts to convey with all the confidence that her youth exudes - she has no constraints, and thus she will fly ...

        Lindy Martin I 'discovered' through an image on a business card in a gallery I visited whilst on holiday!  Two or so years passed but when the terms of exhibition required a collaboration approach, and gave me the free rein of dream choices I remembered, and hunted hard for that business card!!
        Initially I loved her utilization of a functional and traditional everyday household item as the teapot is, elevated further still into the realm of conduit to the creative subconscious!! Or rather the creative concious - Lindy is the seeker, explorer and creative adventurer! Her teapots will never have a functional life other than to transfer one's love to... that is certainty all I ask of them! I don't believe in god, I believe we are a product of the Periodic Table of Elements, and the work of Lindy is just that - a belief in the science of things. She told me of her father, a chemist by profession, who passed on a belief, and a confident reliance in things Elemental along with a desire to pursue the investigation of solutions infinite and without boundary ... if the base of her work is clay; then it's resolution will be a revolution ... watch this exhibition space!

      Come along to Valentine Clays (www.valentineclays.co.uk) for the opening night of '#Scar: from the Rich Earth - opening on Thursday 3rd October 2019 at 5.00pm - a visual feast awaits ...

Dave Proudlove - The Landscape that fired imagination.

The Landscape that Fired Imagination

There is a place in the Potteries known as Etruria Valley, a vast swathe of industrial wasteland, its name an invention, the marketing tool of a property developer looking to make gold from what has been left behind almost twenty years after it fell silent.

That place was better known as Shelton Bar, that enormous steelworks that was once massively important to both North Staffordshire and the nation during a time when we used to make things. A place where thousands of people earned their crust. A place of fear and loathing, fascination and inspiration. A moonscape of craters and lagoons, with a volcanic environment that lit up the sky like the end of the world or a permanent Guy Fawkes night, and that bent those that grafted there into strange shapes.

The steel production processes changed the landscape of the valley forever. Shelton Bar covered over 400 acres, and at its peak, employed around 10,000 people, and as well as it’s steelworks, rolling mills and blast furnaces, had its own railway system, five coal mines, and a by-products processing plant. Shelton Bar opened in 1841, closing its doors for the last time on 27th April 2000, by which time, it’s workforce had been reduced to just 300. It was a place of high productivity, but also efficient and innovative, and in 1964 became the world’s first steel plant using 100% continuously cast production. It was by far the biggest industrial complex in Stoke-on-Trent, and it continues to haunt and inspire the city to this day.

Shelton Bar’s relationship with the human race was mainly an economic one. But for some, it was also a creative relationship, and it has fired the imagination of many throughout the ages.

The Bard of the Potteries Arnold Bennett was transfixed by Shelton Bar, or ‘Cauldon Bar’, as he christened it in his Five Towns epics…

“…long fields of ironstone glowed with all the colours of decadence. The entire landscape illuminated and transformed by these unique pyrotechnics of labour atoning for its grime…”

Artists such as Arthur Berry, Reginald Haggar, Alf Wakefield and Sid Kirkham were fascinated with industrial processes and their effect on people and place, and Shelton Bar hung heavy over much of their work.

During the 1970s, as the nationalised steel industry was undergoing a programme of rationalisation, the future of Shelton Bar was at risk, and the local New Victoria Theatre – at the time, Britain’s only professional theatre in the round – led by their legendary artistic director Peter Cheeseman produced Fight for Shelton Bar, a musical documentary designed to highlight the plight of the thousands of steelworkers whose livelihoods were at risk.

The struggle to preserve the site for the good of the city was also commemorated by a beautiful sculpture by Colin Melbourne which stands proud alongside the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery and bears the inscription:

“I believe in the dignity of labour. Whether with head or hand. That the world owes no man a living, but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living”

The rationalisation of the Shelton Bar site continued into the 1980s, rendering large parts of the site redundant and creating much blight. The Government intervened by selecting the redundant land – alongside Wedgwood’s former Etruria Works – as the location of the second National Garden Festival in 1986, the newly greened and rejuvenated site opened by the Queen. The reclamation works cost £5million, the delivery of the festival £18million, and included some exceptional landscape design – including the planting of 300,000 trees – and great public art, including the sculpture A View, A Place by Antony Gormley which adorns the highest point of the site.

In more recent times, local writer Paul Smith memorably described Shelton Bar in his memoir Tales from the Boothen End – the View from My Window…

“…if you watched long enough…a door would open in the mountain side and fire belched out just below the ridge where Shelton Bar nestles between the pitheads. This was the best train of all, wandering into the great black pit with neat little heaps of fire in the trucks along its length. When it got to the blackest of the ridge, all tipped together and the hot slag poured like a bleeding wound…”

But perhaps the most notable of those affected by this fiery world was a man who hailed from Kent, who began his career as a teacher before becoming one of the world’s most influential writers. That man was H.G. Wells.

Although Wells’ work spanned numerous genres, he became most famous for works such as The War of the Worlds, and The Time Machine. Indeed, Wells was the greatest science fiction panjandrum of the 19th Century.

In 1888, Wells came to the Six Towns to stay with an old college friend at his home in Basford, 18 Victoria Street. While in the Potteries, Wells also spent some time at the Leopard in Burslem, the scene of a deal that enabled the building of the Trent and Mersey Canal, and thus opening-up the valley in which Shelton Bar stood.

The view over urban Stoke-on-Trent from Basford would have been characterised by the filth, fire and smoke from Shelton Bar, and it’s thought that some of the descriptive text in ‘The War of the Worlds’ was inspired by the skies above Shelton Bar’s furnaces.

But Wells went even further. In 1895 he published the short story The Cone, that was directly influenced by Shelton Bar. Described as a tale of “love, unfaithfulness and terrible revenge”, The Cone tells the story of an artist that visits the ironworks to capture the industrial landscape when its manager discovers the artists’ affair with his wife. The Cone depicts both the drama and horror of Shelton Bar, it’s opening line gives a taste of things to come…

“The night was hot and overcast, the sky red, rimmed with the lingering sunset of mid-summer…”

Wells went on to describe…

“…pot-banks and chimneys belching fire and dust into the face of heaven…”

…which captured perfectly the creation of the hideous urban smog that dominated the atmosphere, blackened the fine buildings of the Six Towns, and overcame the locals.

*

Fast forward to 2018, and although Shelton Bar is long gone, it still continues to inspire creative people. Local artist Ian Pearsall’s latest exhibition Fire and Light, is based on his work, Steel, and is hosted by the Art and Craft Collective of Edinburgh.

This new work sees Ian explore familiar themes, but his prodigious use of colour takes him in a slightly new direction, and although I never experienced Shelton Bar, Ian’s work captures perfectly how it appears in my mind’s eye; that lively, volcanic landscape once again firing the imagination of a great and unique talent.

Ian’s passion for the Potteries runs deep, and at the heart of this is his interest in the stories of the people who have populated its industrial landscapes and townscapes over many, many years, and this comes out in Fire and Light.

Central to the exhibition is a haunting piece, ‘John Walks Away’ in which an almost ghost-like human figure stands beside the silhouette of the remaining furnaces of Shelton Bar, and beneath a murky, smoggy sky, knowing that the end was upon him.

And John is a real person, one of the remaining 300 steel workers in the last days of Shelton Bar. John walked away the day before the site closed forever, declining to take his redundancy pay because he had an unshakeable belief that he was going to become a successful professional snooker player.

But John’s dream died in much the way his former workplace did, and he eventually succumbed to an addiction, mirroring the demise of many other former workers in post-industrial towns and cities.

‘John Walks Away’ is classic Pearsall. Through his work, Ian captures the story of a people, and how their environment made and shaped them. He captures the memory and loss associated with deindustrialisation, but in a very real and authentic way. And in the current political climate, dominated by Trump and Brexit, this is incredibly important. Although Fire and Light is a love song to people and place, it is also a major political statement.

Modern Stoke-on-Trent is not the place it was. The pits have gone, the making of pots is now done differently, and Shelton Bar has also disappeared. But it is now one of the greenest cities in the country, and its creative DNA is being put to use in a million other ways; Ian Pearsall is a living, breathing example.

We now have a generation who have little or no idea what life was like before such places fell silent. But thanks to Ian Pearsall other fellow creative minds, we can all get a taste.

Although Shelton Bar is gone, in many ways, it will always be with us.

DP
Sep-18

Mike Cain - A Terrible Beauty.

 
A TERRIBLE BEAUTY: Thoughts on the work of Ian Pearsall by Mike Cain.

Stoke on Trent has been painted and photographed many times over the last hundred years or so. Michael Ayrton painted a 'Shard ruck' in Etruria in the 1930s. Ernest Warrilow created a huge archive of photographs of the city (now held at Keele University) and Arthur Berry painted 'The Potteries' and its people throughout the post-war period until his death in 1994. These and many other artists have made Stoke on Trent one of the most visually well documented places in the country. So whenever I see new work showing the city I ask myself what does this artist bring to the table?
In the case of Ian Pearsall it begins with his composite approach. He sketches, takes photographs and finds images, then draws past and present together into compositions that offer an exciting sense of the dynamic. In one of the paintings the outline of a terrace of houses runs down a hillside from left to right across the picture plane. From the centre of the image comes a line of figures walking towards us. Their collective form makes a kind of black wedge. These elements give the work a sense of movement, space and depth.
Ian’s work isn’t just about Stoke on Trent, but whatever the subject matter his work’s strength often derives from a strong sense of tonality with blacks, whites, and greys juxtaposed with smaller areas of strong colour. His willingness to create what I can best describe as a colour climate rather than working within the perceived palette, shows considerable courage. Finally there is that something special. A kind of raw energy. It is a quality that the poet W.B Yates speaks of in his poem Easter 1916 - 'A terrible beauty'.
Stoke on Trent has produced countless objects of great beauty, but that achievement has come at a great cost. Its interdependent industries not only scarred the land with their smoking chimneys, slag heaps, shard-rucks and marl holes, they scarred the workers and citizens with tuberculosis, silicosis, rickets and all manner of respiratory diseases.
Ian's paintings have great integrity. They do not attempt to glamorise and while they often draw on the past, they do not wallow in sentimentality. He has the courage to show his world ‘warts and all’ hence a 'terrible beauty'. His work has something else – progression. He continues to experiment and to move forward, and it is this, which I believe holds the key to his future as an artist.

'Fire & Light - The STEEL Series of drawings' opens at The Arts & Craft Collective Gallery; 93 Causwayside, Edinburgh, EH9 1QG on Thursday 18th October 2018 at 6.30pm for canapes and drinks! 

 

STEEL at Art & Craft Collective: Edinburgh.

   

   It is spoken in the family story that my Granny as a young woman in the early years of the twentieth century along with her brother Harry and two other sisters, walked the two-hundred and forty three miles from the tiny Scottish coastal town of Ayr to Stoke-On-Trent, my home town. The finer details of this great trek have been eroded by time and by the passing of all whom who undertook it even if the memory of them as individuals has not diminished. Her husband, my Grandad hailed from the Black country where our name is more prolific and a significant piece of the family story begins here in Stoke.
       I was born in Salisbury, Rhodesia in Central Africa. My father; the son of the afore-mentioned union travelled his own journey – it must be in the blood! The war for independence that created Zimbabwe was not my father’s war, and thus we (I was a one-year old on this journey!) drove the three-hundred and sixty-five miles to Blantyre, in Malawi where we lived and I grew up and was schooled for the next sixteen years.
       In 1984 I made my own journey – here to the UK.
One of the first things I did was to visit Blantyre in Scotland; birthplace of Dr. David Livingstone – the man who put the place where I'd spent the early years of my life on the map.
     It is with a huge sense of adventure that I now bring my work here to Edinburgh by the kind invitation of Linsay Given Black of Art & Craft Collective, and I am truly delighted and honoured for yet another great connection with Scotland...

https://www.creative-edinburgh.com/OurMembers/details/9797

https://youtu.be/XFOEBVKjNrk

The Ballad of the Street...

    The year heads inevitably toward a conclusion but my work opens a new chapter and already heralds in the next.

      Over the last few months I've been in collaboration with a man who's finger reassuringly measures the pulse generated by the beating heart of this conurbation, and who's mind interprets facts, disseminates theory and then fashions a suggestion towards remedial solutions; unselfishly and philanthropically by encouraging, nurturing and harnessing community-friendly aspirations through an astutely considered and meticulously researched penmanship that is much anticipated every Wednesday in the pages of The Sentinel Newspaper of North Staffordshire.
      One of his notable hallmarks is to trumpet the work of innovators and social champions whether historically established, overlooked, or thrusting their way into the contemporary context of modern life as it happens now!

      The man is Dave Proudlove who's quietly spoken manner, and cool and collected demeanour belies an explosive internal furnace of energy and ideas enviably capable of harnessing a multitude of muli-faceted disciplines together in an organisational masterclass that just happens to be his every day life.

       If I seem to be displaying considerable bias you could be forgiven, but this is my observation.
If I seem to be strangely knowledgeable on the man, then it is through being on the receiving end of his appraisal, and it has done me no harm - in fact it has terrifyingly raised the tempo considering I was quietly minding my own business when his radar detected my minute creative endeavor, wrestlïng as it has been doing with the enormity of realising personal human stories from within the colossal historical industrial heritage that Stoke-On-Trent is, tucked away in the beautiful but decaying antiquity of a top-floor grotto that lends itself to being my studio in a former pottery works building in Longton town.

      One morning Dave came to see me, and the following week I read this:  http://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/personally-speaking-dave-proudlove-talented-pearsall-is-our-new-man-of-fire/story-30386645-detail/story.html

       That painting of mine spawned a conversation of kindred thinking, and our mutual vision manifested itself as a quest to capture the essence of the vista it created. Over beers in The Congress Inn, Longton he read to me the thoughts he'd put into writing, thus;

       " Ballad of the Streets is a look back at my coming of age in a working class neighbourhood as It's city lost It's industry and some of It's purpose. It is a love letter to It's people and the lives we lived together. It is a howl of fury at misguided and damaging political decisions that have eroded the character of such places, and affected people's lives.

 It is also a look at the human condition in a place without definition. It is part memoir, part social commentary, laced with emotion and dark, dark humour."

        It has been something of a personal journey to illustrate this title, the scope of which in the overall surface of possibility it covers, is only minutely scratched, and I come to realise that our, and millions of other childhoods throughout this city,  and even the world over have kindred resonances - it does not have to be about the surroundings that we grow up within - but about the forgotten, or overlooked intricacies in the act of growing up itself.

      Don't let me give the whole game away though... we don't yet have a tangible product in a finished book, although we're as close as damn-it ...

... come and see us present what we have so far!

Hosted by Trent Art Gallery, ( www.trent-art.co.uk ) in their ongoing series of artist lectures held at the prestigious Potter's Club ( thepottersclub.co.uk )

Online ticket sales:   http://www.wegottickets.com/event/414653
    
    Trent Art Gallery, 19 Brunswick Street, Newcastle-Under-Lyme. ST5 1HF.
Phone: 01782 610588 or Email: art@trent-art.co.uk

Twitter: @TrentArtGallery 
Mine: @flowerboxorguk
 Dave: @fslconsult
Potter's Club: @thepottersclub

City of Fire & Beautiful Bricks...

The Portfolio of Works to date...




..I'm looking for the essence of memories; memories that climb back through the smoke of the hellish industrial landscape of bygone Stoke-On-Trent - the City that my forefathers inhabited, that generations of my family worked and died in.

   As well we all know Stoke-On-Trent is a rapidly developing city mutating and evolving into the future and shaking away the roots of it's ancient industrial past - it is determined and noticeably becoming a new economic hub inhabited with all the characters and players that cornerstone every modern British city nowadays; the Hilton hotel chains, Nando's and all - familiar and formulaic as they may be... there's no point bleating about it as a lot of people do;  growth shapes change, but for now yet, just around the corner under the construction dust lies the old town with it's ancient story and characters!
      
         I am there of course.. and my work brings to life the City of Fire and Beautiful Bricks ...

        The references to the past aren't altogether in the 'Listed Buildings' that sit dead and unused on the high street. They have become iconic in their perfectly preserved state but somehow look lonely - people stare at them and marvel, but they don't always connect. Some great talent needs to weave them into some giant story of this heaving conurbation that awaits writing as yet, but at least they're now guaranteed to be a part of the future somehow - I believe the real story resides in the row upon row of terraced houses; the workers houses (now being demolished by the square mile), the working people of this place and their deep family histories.... When I was a kid, visiting here on my parents annual return home, I was, and still am fascinated by (and terrifed of, back then) 'the entry's' - the playgrounds and growing up 'turf' of my parents and beyond... so many people connect with them as depicted in my work and they tell me so with excited faces, as my parents recollect too; people from all tiers of working society; Labourer to Chief Executive...  they reconnect with their childhoods here... my work is driven and influenced by such places; memories and subliminal references and influences. Two years ago I stayed in Staithes and found in the local gallery an artist named Ian Burke; who through silk-screen printing, and painting delivers a fantastic story of this ancient fishing village through a set of old photographs of the historical inhabitants. Last year I stayed in Filey, and discovered Frank Brangwyn up in Scarborough... within the last few months I went up to see an exhibition by Joan Eardley in Edinburgh - her Glaswegian street-kids.... it's all become a beautiful creative soup! These artists are reinforcing and validating the direction I find myself travelling -  I've been poring over old maps from the Stoke-On-Trent of 1890 and thereabouts for the last five or six years because the stories that folk tell, including my parents, reference places on these maps, and also more so because the City and it's layout are being redrawn for the future.. the streets are being lost! I've always been fascinated by my own family story as far as I know it, and the fact that I came here to become a part of it - it's a great tapestry of influences and they're driving my creative endeavors...

      I want to illustrate those stories; the claustrophobia of living in the shadow of the industrial workplace, the looming effect of the dominant industry sitting ever present and and huge at the end of the street where you live - never out of sight, and never letting the worker forget it either!
My research draws on the old stories; it jumps out of the old maps and photographs - I rebuild lost streets, and reconstruct distant memories from the minds of those who remember the gritty gravitas of working life in pot banks and coal mines... and stories passed down to them through generations who lived through the sheer primitivism of an industrial landscape of a city... I remember when I arrived into it all ... the story is just as involving, just as exciting, and here it is!