See what develops

Write what you know, they say, and for Robert Broad it was the same with photography.

He began in 1984, primarily as a hobby.

“I just shot the things that were around me – pictures of my family and my friends alongside the area where I happened to be living at the time,” he says of his early work in Wakefield.

It became more serious for him following a City & Guilds photography course and a photo essay assignment that he based in the village of Outwood, two miles north of the city centre.

“My fascination and interest with old buildings, dereliction and the uncertainty of change to the urban landscape of Wakefield stemmed from this period. I would wander aimlessly around the area taking pictures of back-to-back housing, disused mills and so on.”

The photos he has on display at the Art House’s Tiled Gallery in Wakefield depict a momentous process of deindustrialisation, demolition and regeneration – one Broad felt was important to capture as a matter of record rather than for nostalgia. But they only cohered into a whole during the pandemic.

“During lockdown, like many of us, I found myself with a fair amount of free time on my hands.

I used some of that time to revisit my archive and select images I had previously overlooked, and it’s these images that I have presented here for this exhibition.”

Robert Broad: My North is at the Tiled Gallery, Art House, Wakefield until 15 May