Liverpool : 1972 – 2025 Volume 1
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Life in Dhaka: A Glimpse of 1980s Child Labour
This photograph of a street stall in a back street in Dhaka records an ordinary moment of working life. The stall itself is extremely small, crowded and improvised, with goods packed into every available space. Behind the boy are shelves filled with bottles and other products, while the foreground contains boxes and packets. The density of objects communicates the cramped conditions of the informal marketplace.
Contemporary evidence shows that child labour was widespread in Bangladesh during the 1980s. A 1986 US Department of State report, citing Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics estimates, put the number of child labourers at around 3 million, compared with 2.5 million in 1981. It also reported that 70% of manual labourers surveyed in Dhaka’s markets were aged between 7 and 15, with children working in transport, carrying loads, construction and other occupations.
The photograph captures more than an individual shop: it records an economic system in which small family businesses and informal work were essential to urban survival; it depicts precisely the kind of informal urban marketplace where children’s labour could occur.
I made this photograph as I was driving slowly past in the passenger seat of a Rickshaw.
Documentary Photography: Moments at a Bus Stop
I’ve always loved the photographic opportunities provided by bus stops. This photograph has a documentary character, but its composition gives the encounter between the two men an almost theatrical quality. I was sitting down at the bus stop at the time and pointed my camera upwards to capture this happy moment when two friends bumped into each other at the bus stop. Their warm handshake is energetic and purposeful.
A bus stop is a wonderfully democratic photographic setting: strangers, friends, commuters, elderly people, shoppers and workers all temporarily occupy the same small piece of civic space. Actually this photo was taken at a tram stop.
For me, the real subject is the momentary intimacy of public life. I’ve captured two people who happen to meet while everyone else waits for transportation. The bus stop becomes a small stage, and the handshake supplies the decisive moment.
Tension Between Reality and Digital Disconnection
In this mixed media piece I’ve attempted to explore tension between stillness and movement, gravity and suspension, reality and imagination. The man on the phone is represented twice, as a positive and negative image. He’s in an intensive conversation but not really connected to his environment. I’ve observed thousands of people walking the streets in different countries either speaking on the phone or gazing into it. They’re largely unaware of the world around them and more connected to a dreamlike digital wilderness. They’re not in the real world.
The positive man contrasts sharply with the almost abstract environment around him. He looks as though he has been extracted from an ordinary street photograph and inserted into a different psychological universe. He’s in a wilderness; a man trying to navigate an increasingly unstable world.
Save Brick Lane: Art, Community, and a Data Centre
In this photomontage / collage I’ve brought three different images together. Behind the cyclist (taken in Bishopsgate in 2021) are two images from the East End taken in the 1980s.
The bicycle suggests someone who can move forward easily, while the trolley suggests someone carrying the past with them. I’m capturing people who are simply passing through the same place (at different times) but experiencing completely different realities. The two figures from the 1980s are fully aware of their surroundings whereas the young man is absorbed by his phone looking at instructions about where to take the food order. The pace of his life is entirely different from the other subjects and largely shaped by digital technology. The man with the umbrella is walking past a shop in Brick Lane that was demolished a year later.
The government has just approved a massive data centre on the Truman brewery site on Brick Lane. In recent years there’s have been demonstrations and public meetings, including protests specifically demanding ‘homes, not data centres’.
The Save Brick Lane campaign is a grassroots coalition involving residents, community organisations, charities and people with longstanding connections to Spitalfields and Banglatown. It’s been campaigning against the wider Truman redevelopment since 2020. The approved scheme includes a 5,200 m² data centre, while campaigners argue that the land should instead contribute to housing; the wider development provides 44 homes, only six of them social housing, whereas the community-led alternative has focused on hundreds of homes. I know whose side I’m on!
From Ropewalks to Cafés: Bold Street’s Evolution
I’ve walked through Bold Street many times since I first came to Liverpool in 1972.
Bold Street had an interesting history before it became the fashionable commercial street it is today. The area was associated with rope-making. Its long, relatively straight form was suitable for laying out rope, and the wider neighbourhood consequently became known as the Ropewalks. The street was subsequently developed for housing from around the 1780s and was named after Jonas Bold, a wealthy merchant, banker and later Lord Mayor of Liverpool.
Jonas Bold was involved in the sugar trade and in businesses connected with the slave trade; Historic England records his connections with the trade in enslaved Africans. The ropeworks that preceded the development of the street were also associated with merchants involved in slavery.
I’m reminded that apparently ordinary streets can contain histories of wealth, exploitation and global trade that are no longer immediately visible. The men carrying equipment in the foreground are contemporary workers, but they occupy a street whose physical development was closely connected with the labour and commerce of the port. The photograph connects present-day urban work with Liverpool’s industrial and maritime past.
It’s an apparently ordinary moment, but I think the image becomes a study of work, movement, commerce, migration, architecture and Liverpool’s layered history. The large man walking towards the camera dominates the left-hand side of the frame. His heavy build, dark clothing and work equipment give him a physical presence that contrasts with the slimmer man behind him, who is carrying a parcel. Both are clearly engaged in work, and both are caught mid-stride. Their bodies and legs create a strong sense of movement across the otherwise static street. No doubt it’s a moment that has been created many times before in the history of the street.
Bold Street today is particularly associated with independent shops, cafés and restaurants and is largely pedestrianised, making it an unusually good setting for observing people. I wouldn’t dream of walking there without my camera!
The ropewalk has disappeared, the merchants and their houses have changed function, and today’s workers carry parcels and supplies for restaurants and shops serving a global city. I hope my black-and-white image freezes one instant in that continuing process of change, making the familiar street appear both contemporary and deeply historical.
