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26 March 2024

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10 April 2024

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11 April - 18 May 2024

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21 March 2024

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4 March - 28 February 2025

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CREATIVE SOCIAL: IN THE ABSENCE OF FORMAL GROUND

2 March 2024

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8 February - 31 March 2024

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Contrail Cirrus: the impact of aviation on climate change

7 March 2024

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16 February - 1 May 2024

Open Source #27: Saffron Lily – In The Absence of Formal Ground @ Digital Window Gallery

6 February - 31 March 2024

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Contemporary Photography from Ukraine: Symposium @University of Salford

4 March - 5 March 2024

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Is Anybody Listening? Symposium: Commissioning and Collecting Socially Engaged Photography

29 February 2024

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15 February 2024

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18 January 2024

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Tree Walks Of Sefton Park with Andrea Ku

21 January 2024

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Artists Remake the World by Vid Simoniti: Book Launch

31 January 2024

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Shift Liverpool Open Meeting

6 February 2024

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We Feed The UK Launch and LOOK Climate Lab 2024 Celebration

8 February 2024

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17 February 2024

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End of Empire: artist talk and discussion

22 February 2024

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24 February 2024

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Local ecology in the post-industrial era: open discussion

14 March 2024

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23 March 2024

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16 March 2024

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9 March 2024

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23 March 2024

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Force For Nature Exhibition

27 March - 28 March 2024

Voices of Nature: Interactive Performances

28 March 2024

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27 February 2024

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LOOK Climate Lab 2024

18 January - 31 March 2024

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MA Socially engaged photography Open Day event

1 February 2023

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13 December 2023

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23 November 2023

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6 November - 5 February 2024

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30 November 2023

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14 October 2023

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26 October - 11 April 2024

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Critique Surgery for Socially Engaged Photographers

6 November 2023

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12 October 2023

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29 September - 23 December 2023

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19 October 2023

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28 September 2023

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12 September - 22 December 2023

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The People's Church, Everton, Liverpool, 1686 © Vanley Burke
© John Stoddart, 1984-1985
© John Stoddart, 1984-1985
© John Stoddart, 1984-1985
© John Stoddart, 1984-1985

Godless Landscapes?

Dan Warner is a 3rd year PhD Researcher and Teacher at the University of Liverpool. Having completed a B.A. in History and an M.A. in Cultural History, his thesis utilises social documentary photography to explore working class culture in British inner cities during the 1970s. Dan completed a placement at Open Eye Gallery in 2015, composing and delivering the Spoken Words and Photographs event during which images from the Gallery’s archive were matched with local oral histories. In the following series of blogs, Dan explores the research conducted, including representations of life in British inner cities at the time and the uses of urban street photography as an historical source. In this blog, Dan explores how John’s photography highlights how local children and adolescents made the most of a rapidly changing and decaying landscape.

Around the same time as John and Vanley began taking their photographs of the Piggeries, Roy Kerridge, a reporter for The Spectator, also happened upon the blocks during a visit to the city. In his account, the flats had become a symbol of the persistent religious tensions that still continued to partially define the landscape.

“The most famous of Liverpool’s dreadful flats are the Piggeries, which now stand empty and grey with dirt, nearly every window smashed. They look eerie in their solitude. However, I could not but admire the vandals in a way, for with courage over and above the call of vandalism, they had swarmed all over the outside of a block, high up in the air, and painted enormous slogans on the dizzying heights. Probably they had used ropes and mountaineering boots. ‘God Bless Our Pope’ I read, rather moved. Other, pro-IRA, slogans pleased less.

Once a front line in a district of Ulster immigrants and their grandchildren, the Piggeries look across to Everton Brow and Everton Road, Orange Protestant territory, where the slogans are ‘1690’, ‘Orange Order Rules’ and ‘Here to Stay, UDA’. In a daring raid, someone has even added a few IRA slogans here too.”[1]

Some of the graffiti of which Roy speaks can be seen from Vanley’s shot above. The area itself had been a hotbed of sectarianism during the early part of the twentieth century, and it was the embers and remains of this religious landscape, often continued through traditions such as Orange Lodge associations, that fascinated John. However, John found something more akin to a community club than a political or religious institution:

“I thought they were fantastic. Some of their nutty nights out were great. I remember speaking to one old lady, she wasn’t interested in anything religious at all, and she said they’d saved her life because she was cooped up in some dump in Everton Heights and they got her out and took her to these barmy social clubs with all the mad seventies music.”

Indeed, John’s photographs highlight the continuing centrality of the Orange Lodge as a community hub and not simply as an emblem of religious or political beliefs. His photographs of their “nutty nights out” highlight that for many of its members the religious connotations of the organisation were subsumed under the more mundane experience of everyday life. For John, these lively events were a test of his photography skills.

“You can see that they’re really rammed. I couldn’t say it was intentional because these rooms weren’t very well lit. I’d use the flash on the camera to make the shot quite brutal. Some of them almost look like paintings, a tableau of these people, there, just drinking. And there’d be one or two where someone will just be looking straight into the camera while everyone else was oblivious to what I was doing.”

In spite of the increasingly secular society in which it found itself, by the early 1980s the annual 12th July parade was still a visible and vibrant street presence. Setting out from all areas of the city, the Lodge organisations would converge on the city centre and board trains to Southport. This image that John captured looks down London Road, with the corner of Saint George’s Hall just visible in the background.

“The marching season was a photographer’s dream. They certainly dressed up for it back then. There was always a little lad at the front with the baton or something. I used to love the marches, they really made an effort.”

For many, the spectacle provided an opportunity to have some fun. However, for some it was a day when religion and politics asserted themselves onto the local landscape. John remembered the days simmered with a tension just below the surface.

“But at the same time it wasn’t like, “Oh, lets just have a bit of fun.” Yeah, it was all marching and the crazy music and the banners, but underneath it all there was that little tension.”

Indeed, despite his positive experiences with the Lodge, John still felt unable to tell them of his own background.

“I’m a Catholic myself. I never told them that. That’s how weird it was. I had to take my Northern Ireland medal to show that I’d been in the army.”

A photograph that perhaps illustrates these underlying tensions is shown below. Previously unclassified in the archive, John immediately recognised this photograph as his own and managed to provide a detailed contextual picture. His description not only highlights the tensions that remained, but the continuing demarcations of the landscape across the boundaries of religion. Even at this late stage then, it appears that there remained areas that were Catholic and areas that were Protestant:

“That picture you’ve got of the lad being nicked by the police – there was always a little undercurrent of that. I don’t want to paint a picture of some little street urchins having good fun. He was caught throwing rocks at the Lodge. They deliberately marched through Catholic areas. It all sounds bloody stupid now, but it did get a bit tense.”

“There’s another picture I’ve taken, though I’m not sure if the Open Eye has got it, that’s quite surreal because there’s a lot of sky and there’s people hanging around. Some of them are dressed in the clothes of the Lodge. And you can see in their faces that something is going on. There were all these rocks coming over, and it was him throwing them. The police caught him pretty quickly.”

 

[1] R. Kerridge, ‘City of Dreadful Flats’, Spectator, 31st January 1981, p. 13

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