browseWorking the Landscape: Images of Frosterley
Richard Grassick (Photographer), Jane Greenwell (Photographer), George Dodsworth (Photographer), Pete Maddison (Photographer)
From the original Side Gallery exhibition text, 1991:
This exhibition, through a series of landscapes and portraits, examines the varied and sometimes conflicting images of a Weardale village built on a tradition of extraction industries and farming, trying to come to terms with the development of tourism as a key industry for the future of Weardale.
Much of the work in this exhibition was taken in 1984, at a time when Durham County Council published its discussion document The Future of the Durham Dales. This catalogued the decline in employment prospects and population in Weardale, a decline that was affecting all the major industries of agriculture, minerals and quarrying, manufacturing and services. The portraits taken then show how Frosterley was a village still rooted in these industries - fluorspar mining at Cambokeels mine, and the resultant processing at Broadwood flotation plant, limestone extraction at the biggest Dales employer, Eastgate Cement Works, and farming around all sides of the village and beyond.
The landscape of the village is still firmly in that ‘working dale’ tradition, with signs everywhere of the work of the human hand on the shape and form of the land. Pockets of cratered grazing land reveal the old sites of lime quarries once worked by most of the villagers. It was the quarrymen who built Frosterley village hall, in their spare time, and in many ways the village owes its identity to lime extraction. The quarries attracted people to the area, brought the railway up the Dale, and knitted together what were formerly separate farming hamlets into the village as it stands.