raham Smith took this picture at Clay Lane ironworks on the south bank of the Tees in 1981, when he was in his early 30s. In some ways, it represented a fate that he had avoided. Three generations of his family, on his father’s side, had spent working lives in ironmaking. His father, Albert Smith, would, he recalls, return from long shifts and all-nighters, “filthy, stinking of oil, stale sweat and, if money permitted, Bass beer”.
Photography was Smith’s escape, though he stayed close to the culture of home, taking pictures in the 1970s and 1980s of life in the shadow of the ironworks, of long nights in local pubs, at a time when Britain’s industrial landscape was being erased. A retrospective of the pictures of those years, alongside those of Smith’s great friend and collaborator Chris Killip, will open at Martin Parr’s gallery in Bristol in April.
The exhibition includes this picture, a private kind of memorial. Towards the end of his working life, Albert Smith had been part of a squad repairing and relining the No 2 furnace at Clay Lane, working high on the outside of the tower, on scaffolding two boards deep. The repaired furnace was never commissioned, however, and the entire plant was demolished in 1988. Albert Smith’s funeral was at a redbrick church overlooking the demolition site.
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