Jan Gray

Photography

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     a photographer..........wandering the south downs, often into abstraction

     

    After Tide Mills

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    When I was 14 my Dad was out of work, we were crippled financially and my Mum often cried at night. He was a proud, hard working man, but hereditary heart disease along with 30 fags a day rendered his arteries incompatible with his job as a Milkman. So he had to 'give it up or die', as the Doctor put it. Unskilled, 58 years old with a dodgy ticker in Thatcher's Britain, he was screwed. Noone would employ him. For 5 long years. 

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    His case was only one of many. The crumbling of the concept of 'society', mass unemployment, poverty and a sense of hopelessness made life as a working class family hard.

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    The East Sussex ruin Tide Mills, which lies between the coastal towns of Seaford and Newhaven, reminds me of that hopelessness. It was a small village that prospered in its prime as a flour mill community. Constructed in 1761, it had its own school, railway station and dozens of cottages. Industrial and social changes eventually closed the mill and the houses began to deteriorate through lack of investment. Occupants lived in squalor and they were deemed unfit for human habitation. Residents were forcibly removed in 1939. A community closed, ended, broken by economic change that forgot to care what happened to the workforce. The miners anyone? 

     

    Cue The Specials:

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    Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town?
    We danced and sang, and the music played in a de boomtown

    [Jerry Dammers, 'Ghost Town', 1981]

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