I grew up near Penny Lane in Liverpool but I didn’t see many blue suburban skies. Just like any other northern industrial city, it was kind of desolate. Bomb sites everywhere. As I got older, it became harder to tell which bomb sites were from the war and which had been inflicted by Liverpool city planners.
I started taking photographs in my teens after failing to get into medical school. I worked for a while for the ambulance service, transporting elderly and disabled people to and from day centres. It took me all over the city, including condemned streets where people were still living in sad and deprived conditions in houses marked for demolition. Later, while studying photography at the Polytechnic of Central London in 1973, I went back to one of those streets with my camera.
