The journey began with an idea to recognise and explore a photographic social history of the former new town Skelmersdale.

The project began as a way to capture the history of the former new town by co-creating a new collection of material containing photographs, films and recorded oral interviews. This was in response to having no available or cohesive collection in which the new town shared its own story. Its identity was not being valued or included in the wider national new town debate. 

In 2011 the town reached its 50th anniversary since the original new town designation in 1961. We wanted to draw on this aspect of the town’s recent anniversary as a starting point to discuss with the local community, their experiences of living and working in Skelmersdale during the past 50 years, how the new town has changed, how communities have emerged or disappeared. The new town is on the cusp of major infrastructure change, with many developments planned that will further alter the original designs of the new town as laid out by the architects and urban planners within the original Skelmersdale Development Corporation (SDC). 

The project involved working in the new town for two years, building relationships and trust with local residents and businesses. Many events were held, from pop-up exhibition spaces in the local shopping centre, to photo walks, free archive trips, volunteer training, to creative writing performances. Lots of energetic and challenging conversations were held.

A pivotal moment in the project came during a trip to Lancashire Archives in Preston. In several filling cabinets were thousands of glass slides and documents from the original SDC collection, that had been deposited with the archives back in 1989. The glass slides covered the development of the former new town from the surveys before the ground was broke, right up to when the Corporation closed. They were truly a photographic journey through the towns beginnings, adolescence and adulthood. 

So we begin scanning. 

The project has created a legacy of collaboration and partnership that was to continue into new ways of working and future opportunities, but more importantly, it gave the inhabitants of the new town an opportunity to have a dialogue through the pictures they had been taking over the past 50 years. Typically Architectural and landscape photographs with portraits and shots of seemingly unimportant details. It is only through the arrangement in groups that the interplay and dialogue between the images that individual images acquire their distinct meaning and the issue of a relation between spacial environment and individual biography comes into view.

The results of this project is a new photographic archive for the former new town (www.picturenewtown.org), where anyone can contribute, and still do so, a 196 page high quality hard backed book and an exhibition of prints (which was only temporarily installed but have been requested to remain in situ for the foreseeable future). 

At the book launch, Paul Farley (who wrote an essay for the publication) gave a reading of his introduction and how pictures of their town is a form of intimate time-travel. 

‘I look at the pictures from Skelmersdale, the light arriving from a distant place. I recognise this landscape. I’m familiar with these buildings, these raised walkways and underpasses, these precincts and benches and lamp-posts, these lines of newly laid flagstones receding to vanishing points in hard black-and-white, that green swathe that softens and gathers and stands its ground above the town. I know that cerulean sky above the Nye Bevan Pool. I’m familiar with the colour balance and cast of the images themselves, formed by dye processes in printing machines long gone for scrap, which once stood behind the counters of chemist shops in places like the Concourse.’