CHANGES:STOKE:CITY

This photography project responded to a brief to record details of the old canal that ran through Etruria in Stoke-on-Trent in advance of radical inner city redevelopment. At the time it was disused and in a poor state, its towpath running past the empty, windowless shells of warehouses and factories that were once home to thriving businesses at the heart of the Industrial Revolution. It was a long stretch of dereliction and stagnation with a haunted Romanticism all its own and it felt fitting to freeze frame this state of portentous limbo during a particularly hard winter, as all my winters in Stoke during the 1980s seemed to be! 

 

 

(Images copyright 1987 Remy Dean - please credit) 

CHANGES:STOKE:CITY was one of my earliest series of photographs and became my first public exhibition, shown at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, in 1987, where I also appeared as a cave man in one of their video exhibits recreating a scene from neolithic life in the region, which was filmed at the 'haunted' Beech Caves. 

A few years later, one of the images was used as the cover image of my debut novel, Scraps, published by questing beast books, in 1994, which was partly set in a version of Stoke conjured from my memory and imagination.