browseSteel Works
Julian Germain (Photographer)
Original Side Gallery exhibition text, 1989:
This exhibition represents a series of accounts of Consett, both from within the community and from outside. It contains images that were taken between 1910 and 1989, before, after, and during the closure of Consett steelworks. The images are derived from different areas of photographic practice - documentary, editorial, art, press, community and family snapshot, each having its own traditions and styles. This exhibition is constructed from these diverse representations of a town.
The text is a collection of impressions of Consett from local sources, published and unpublished. Since the end of steel making in the town, a new generation has grown up with only a half remembered, half imaginary vision of the past. Included here are the views of a group of young people aged between sixteen and nineteen, their impressions of Consett now, and as it was.
There was a time when to be from Consett was to be almost a celebrity. Catapulted into the media spotlight, we were photographed and interviewed by every kind of journalist, analysed by economists and sociologists, became the subject of television documentaries and academic studies. Now the vast steelworks site, grassed over and landscaped, awaits council inspiration. Of the proposed schemes, which have included a Category A prison, the most bizarre has been a tourist theme park for the elderly entitled ‘The Coming Of Age.'
How do you define a community? The community of Consett has been defined and re-defined throughout its history. A town that was invented by four ‘well-to-do gentlemen of Tyneside’ because of accessible mineral resources; a major centre of iron and steel production in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the declining peripheral outpost of a nationalised industry; the closure, the Jarrow of the 1980s, and now the success story again, the vindication of Thatcherite economics.
These are the official accounts of Consett perpetuated through politics and the media. Accounts which usually say little about the lives of the people who make up this community. Ordinary people whose lives were shaped by an industrial process which gave them jobs and marked out their social and cultural identity. Now that identity has gone, replaced by something less tangible.
In the past nine years, Consett has changed almost beyond recognition. The steelworks have been completely dismantled by the largest demolition project in Europe. All physical traces of the past have been removed. As politicians and industrialists set about constructing a different future, what defines the community now? What identity are people forming for themselves in the new Consett and how do they regard the past?
Note: In the exhibition, Julian Germain included earlier documentations of Consett, including the work of Consett photographer Tommy Harris and of Don McCullin.