Byker
Photos by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen
Dewi Lewis Publishing, £40

BYKER is a working-class district in Newcastle upon Tyne. Home to the Byker Wall estate, given prominence by the TV series Byker Grove. Its population was 12,206 in the 2011 census.

As so many northern towns, Byker had scarcely changed since Victorian times, consisting largely of densely built terraces. A quarter of people in Byker have a long-term health problem or a disability which affects day-to-day activities.

Lone-parent households with dependent children accounted for 12.3 per cent of all households, which is almost double the city average. Much of the housing needed major repair and was considered unfit for human habitation, yet most residents wished to stay in Byker.

In 1966 Newcastle City Corporation took the decision to redevelop the area. Its aim was to clear the slums but keep the community together.

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen is a Finnish-born photographer and film-maker as well as a founder member of the Amber Film & Photography Collective and the Side Photographic Gallery based in Newcastle upon Tyne.

Byker was extensively photographed before its demolition, primarily by Konttinen who lived there from the late 1960s. Her striking, unforgettable black-and-white images are an invaluable record of that pre-development era. However, they are also so much more than a mere record.

Her keen eye and empathetic approach, gives her images a riveting, iconic quality. She captures the humanity, the solidarity and strong sense of community that characterised this area, neglected, like so many others in the north, by consecutive central governments.

Konttinen captured an era and a community forged in the hardship of back-breaking industrial work, low pay and severe deprivation over decades.

Particularly, in her images of the women and children of Byker, Konttinen reveals a feminist empathy and understanding. She captures a whole social history that documents the human cost of raw capitalism, but also the resilience of working people.

This community emerged alongside the engineering factories and shipyards which lent it the very reason for its existence. Those industries are now long gone and many of the values of that community and its raison d’etre with them.  

While it would be perverse and anachronistic to talk of nostalgia, many of the people who lived and still live there do look back on the past with a fondness and regret that so much has been lost.  

Commenting on this landmark book, Jeremy Seabrook, writing in New Society, said: “…the attachment to places that have been the site of struggle and love and suffering is no love of brick and stone and poverty, but a measure of the intensity of what people felt for each other here … Here is a sensibility, a wisdom of the eye and the heart that makes this collection unforgettable.”

Originally published in 1983 by Jonathan Cape, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Byker is recognised as a seminal body of work and a modern classic of photography.

Her work gained national recognition as a key photographic account of a rich working-class culture on the eve of its destruction. The book was selected by The Observer as one of the top 10 books of the year.

In 2011 Konttinen’s photography and Amber’s films were inscribed in the Unesco UK Memory of the World Register as being of outstanding national value and importance to Britain.

A limited edition of 100 copies is available at an initial launch price of £85. This includes the book and a 10"x8" giclee print made by Spectrum Photographic, Brighton, with supervision by Sirkka.

Each print is signed and numbered and presented in a glassine sleeve. The print, Girl on a Spacehopper, is of one of Konttinen’s most-loved images and features as the cover image of the book.