The Road To Shirley Baker

I was delivering some pictures to the Working Class Movement Library in Salford in the north of England when I noticed someone putting away a poster which had advertised the screening of a film called ‘Life Through A Lens’.

The poster showed a photograph of three girls skipping over a rope in the middle of a road without cars and between rows of poor red brick houses.
I’d missed the screening but one of the Library’s volunteers showed me a couple of prints made by the photographer whose life was celebrated by the film.
The photographer was Shirley Baker. The same volunteer took me walking through the areas of Salford where those red brick rows would once have stood.
We walked through the high rise blocks of flats and into the glass and steel landscape of Media City where the docks at the end of the Manchester Ship Canal once worked.
There were a lot of elements at play drawing me into Shirley Baker’s photographs. The first hook, I suppose, was nostalgia.
I was born into those working class red brick terraces in the north of England.
1950s Carlisle, nestling just under the Scottish border, didn’t have the same industrially exploitative and dangerous dwellings which were everywhere in the Manchester area but my early days were spent in sight of mill chimneys and I lived on cobbled streets of two up and two down houses with a toilet in the yard.

Portrait of the curator as a young man 
Salford 1962 © The Estate of Shirley Baker

A decade after my birth Shirley Baker was making her extraordinary
photographs. Her most powerful work was made between the early 1960s
 and the early 1970s. She was not alone in recording English working class streets at that time but, for me, there was something very special about herphotographs which concentrate on the experiences of women and children in particular.

As her fame grew, an important exhibition featuring her work was shown at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. The show was called ‘Women and Children; and Loitering Men’ and it encapsulated what Shirley saw on Salford’s streets.
Interest in her work began to grow steadily with photographs being acquired by The Tate Gallery and The Martin Parr Foundation among many other institutions.
Books have been published and the ‘Life Through A Lens’ film, directed by Jason Figgis, has had considerable critical acclaim.So struck was I by the emotional impact and quality of the pictures that I was amazed not to have heard of her before stumbling on the pictures by accident.
I found a telephone number and rang Shirley Baker’s daughter, Nan, out of the blue, just to try to get a lead which would help me see more of the work. That telephone call led to my being able to curate a major exhibition of Shirley Baker’s iconic period of street photography in my home town of Stroud in Gloucestershire.
Finding Shirley Baker’s work coincided with a project of my own which I had been working through for a while.

I was delivering some pictures to the Working Class Movement Library in Salford in the north of England when I noticed someone putting away a poster which had advertised the screening of a film called ‘Life Through A Lens’.

I found, and photographed, a small patch of concrete and a hill constructed over what would have been the foundation of the building in the village of Cranham, near where I live.

Having that in the collection, I thought I would follow George Orwell and see what I could find of Wigan Pier.

Once Orwell’s writing is in your mind it’s hard to get the sights and smells of the slum housing he describes in ‘The Road To Wigan Pier’ out of your imagination.
Like many photographers before me I’ve tried to find a trace of that old, long gone, world in the shapes of the new. Looking for ghosts I guess.
I’m well aware of the heart breaking difficulties infecting peoples lives through poverty and exploitation and I can’t find many arguments which would support the idea that people would be better off if they still lived in the houses Orwell described. I’m even aware that 21st Century poverty still supports the most disgusting housing and homelessness imaginable. It would be well to be rid of it all.But there is still a nagging insistence that something other than shoddy housing was lost in these 1960s developments. The baby of something human thrown out with the dirty bathwater of the unendurable.
Of course it’s the sense of community that has gone. People talking and passing time on the street. Children playing, people working together and living together. The whole stage show of shared experience built up over years and generations.It’s these experiences, this way of life, which is captured and preserved in Shirley Baker’s photographs.It wasn’t until I read a sentence in Olivia Laing’s , ‘A Garden Against Time’, that I properly understood what it was I was looking for in these time drenched photographs and what I was seeing as increasingly disappointing modern urban life. Laing said, “What I wanted to know was what it was like to be dispossessed by the work of improvement.
”I made a few photographs in Wigan just a few months ago. The whole townscape behind the main road of shops was gone. Flattened for improvement.

Wigan Pier, which exists in name only, was an empty set of lovely buildings which, people told me, were supposed to be transformed into an arts complex but the development had run out of money and remained, stubbornly, unfinished.

 No-one I spoke to had much belief that the proposed improvements would result in improved living. I photographed a developers’ fence with a banner attached to it boasting “Protecting our heritage”, behind which was a building site from which any heritage had been totally expunged.
In Salford, where Shirley Baker had made her dynamic, life filled, pictures, the grim streets on which the life she saw was played out are replaced by Media City. This new landscape is designed to be impressive but it’s grim, too, in its own way.The term, ‘soulless’, can be applied as a contrasting description. Used this way it can describe an empty and intimidating environment against one which embraces people and communities.Media City is soulless.Ironically, the streets which were the stage sets for the plays acted out on them have been replaced by television companies which distil and define the stuff of community and broadcast it into living rooms separated by curtains from the streets.During preparation for the exhibition of the Shirley Baker photographs, I spent some time with someone who grew up alongside the new Media City as it grew up around him.He still visited it often and his abiding impression of the place is its emptiness. People only seemed to move through it to transact business. Or, at least, most people did.

I showed him a photograph I had made of a group of young people, alone in a vast paved area, surrounded by high rise office buildings of media empires. They were kicking a ball around like young people have always done.My friend told me that, when he was younger, he used these canyons to play football, meet girls, ride skateboards and fool around. They were empty spaces, he remembered, and if you could put up with being chased away now and again, they were useful spaces.The work of improvement does, indeed, dispossess people and often creates an unnatural environment but, thankfully, natural behaviour, rather like wildflowers and weeds, clings onto the spaces that people seem to have an innate tendency to use and put their mark on.The exhibition, ‘Shirley Baker, Street Photographs’ is showing at The Museum In The Park, Stroud, Gloucestershire throughout March 2025.

Manchester 1965 © The Estate of Shirley Baker

For details see www.museuminthepark.org.uk
www.shirleybakerphotography.com
www.fredchance.co.uk

Fred Chance

.