Life Goes On exhibition by Ian Beesley at Salts Mill

“They won’t mean anything to those who weren’t around then. People tell me, ‘I never really knew what my grandad did in the mill’,” says Ian.

“Many of the local dialect words peculiar to trades and industries have vanished; the jobs are extinct and so are the words to describe them.”

Ian’s remarkable photography, documenting life in the North, pays tribute to “the folks who grafted through their lives doing these jobs”.

His new exhibition, Life Goes On, which has opened at Salts Mill, presents striking images of people at work and leisure - some previously unseen and some back by popular demand.

Ian has captured people of the North at work and play (Image: Mike Simmonds)

Ian recently turned 70 and had planned to retire.

His 2022 Salts Mill exhibition Life: A Retrospective was an extraordinary success, attended by more than 38,000 people.

It was, he says, “supposed to be my swan song”. Last year the acclaimed photographer donated his entire archive - more than 200,000 items, including photos, negatives and notebooks - to Bradford Industrial Museum, a stone’s throw from where he grew up, in Eccleshill.

Bonfire building on Tunwell Lane, Eccleshill

His images continue to resonate: “I still hear from people saying things like: ‘My dad’s in that factory photo’ or ‘I’m one of the kids playing in that street’. They worked in industries long gone, played in streets long demolished. Now they want to show their grandchildren,” says Ian.

“People kept asking ‘When’s the next exhibition?’”

So Ian put off retirement and put together Life Goes On, featuring key areas of his work. There’s a story behind every photo. While some raise a smile - a lad on a Chopper bike; kids mucking about in a horse van; women in hairnets, arms defiantly folded; a proud champ of pub game knurr and spell - others are profoundly moving.

There’s a bleak beauty in the lone pubs, occasionally a chip shop, which were all that remained of old streets once the houses had been demolished. They became a familiar sight around Bradford. Ian documented the final days of one such pub, the Moulders Arms on Sticker Lane, standing “proud and defiant” until it too was knocked down in 1983.

The Prospect pub on Bolton Road

“The locals were scattered across Bradford but continued their social lives in the Moulders. The football and darts teams still played, the pigeon man and allotment holders met, the Sons of the Desert wore their fezzes on the last Friday of the month.”

In another photo, a mill off Thornton Road is reduced to a pile of rubble in the 1970s.

“I frequently found myself a few steps in front of the bulldozer as dozens of mills were swept away. Many times I was present at the moment a mill ceased production and was emptied of people,” says Ian.

Photographing the final years of these industries was his way of documenting them - and “sticking up for working people”.

Card fettlers at Brackendale Mills in Thackley (Image: Ian Beesley)

“All my family worked in mills,” says Ian.

“In the 1980s and 90s a lot of firms used to contact me, wanting a record of it all before it went. By 2010 that had changed. By then it was brutal closures, wiping away any trace of what had been, by developers who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing.”

A pile of rubble is all that remains of a mill off Thornton Road (Image: Ian Beesley)

There are striking images of working life: looms, spinning rooms, wool sacks, mugs of tea. Some photos were taken at Salts Mill in the 1980s.

“I’ve had a 40-year relationship with this place - as a working mill, empty, derelict and when the Silver family developed it,” says Ian.

Other mills seen through his lens are Listers, the Conditioning House, British Mohair Spinners in Shipley and Esholt Sewage Works, where Ian worked before going to Bradford Art College.

Ian has been documenting life in the North for 50 years

Also on display, 40 years on from the miners’ strike, are images of working coalfields in Yorkshire and Lancashire. The Illustrated Man is a portrait of an ex-miner:

“He broke his neck in a colliery accident and, no longer able to work down the pit, he had his body tattooed and got a job in a fair,” says Ian.

“He went on to tour the UK and US as ‘The Illustrated Man’. Then he studied ornithology at night school and worked on a bird reserve.”

The Illustrated Man was an ex-miner who went on to work in fairgrounds (Image: Ian Beesley)

Ian photographed street games as a young graduate in the late 1970s: “I got a Kodak Scholarship for Social Documentation and headed home to Bradford. I didn’t have much money or a car so I used to walk around streets looking for subjects to photograph. Street corners were where people gathered.

"There’d be children playing marbles and building bonfires; things you just don’t see now. I shot in black and white not for aesthetic reasons - it was all I could afford. Now it’s incredibly expensive.”

'Street corners were where people gathered and children played' (Image: Ian Beesley)

A former Artist in Residence at Bradford City, Ian’s Valley Parade images including players training and crowd scenes. “I’m still a season ticket holder. A frustration of taking photos was that I had my back to the pitch,” he smiles.

He’s currently the Born in Bradford Artist in Residence and on display are his portraits of twins from the project.

One of the most poignant images in the exhibition is of Dolly, an elderly woman incarcerated in Lancaster Moor psychiatric hospital in her early teens for having an illegitimate baby.

“We were looking through a magazine, she saw a photo of a young child and held it to her face saying ‘I had a baby, I had a baby’. She never left the Moor. She died 18 months after I took her photo,” says Ian.

The exhibition also includes some of Ian’s collections of negatives, reflecting the “slow, skilful process” of pre-digital photography: “Negative are in decline but I think they’re beautiful. A ghostly, ethereal artefact.”

• Life Goes On is in Gallery 2, Salts Mill, until January 2025.