40th Anniversary Exhibition: Roads To Wigan Pier

Taking as their starting point George Orwell's seminal 1937 publication The Road to Wigan Pier, six newly graduated students of photography were commissioned by Impressions in 1984 to record and document social aspects of the North of England.

These non-judgemental, yet sometimes shocking, photographs show us a way of life that was in terminal decline. This picture of Orwellian dystopia acts as an elegy of the northern urban landscape and its people, on the brink of irrevocable social and cultural change.