Vintage Photos Captured Britain’s Vanished Industrial Heartlands

Everyday life in Wallsend and South Shields was provided with a backdrop of huge ships and industrial cranes, which immensely fascinated Chris Killip. The ship Tyne Pride, which he photographed in 1975, was the biggest ship ever built on the river, but also one of the last. “Even then I had a sense that all this was not going to last,” he says, “though I had no idea how soon it would all be gone.”

In an early photograph, Tyne Pride looms over children playing in the street. Only two years later, another photograph shows the same street demolished, dramatic evidence of the industry’s decline. Other photographs capture the energy of the mid-1970s, with ships under construction and shipyard workers streaming out of the gates at the end of shift.

Killip’s photographs document the lives of working people and their resilience of spirit while at the same time recording the steady decline of industrial Britain. Initially coming to the North East in 1975 as the Northern Arts Photography Fellow, Chris Killip lived and worked on Tyneside until 1991 when he was recruited by Harvard University to teach photography in its Visual Studies Program. In honour of the shipyard workers of Tyneside, he gave this set of exhibition prints to the Laing.