A tour of the Monuments of Quarry Hill: Welcome + Village + Peter Mitchell.

As Welcome and Village Books team up with Peter Mitchell for a collaborative skateboard deck featuring one of his most iconic images, Jono Coote posits the photographer’s work in discussion with another artist for whom oft-maligned architectural tropes have offered inspiration, and who delights in finding the spiritual in the prosaic. Have a read, peep the images below, have a rummage through Village in person or via the medium of pixels for some Peter Mitchell works, and be sure to check out Strangely Familiar for interviews with and books and prints by the photographer.

In the artist Robert Smithson’s multimedia work A Tour of the Monuments of the Passaic, a bus journey from Manhattan to the brown belt wilds of New Jersey sees his seemingly banal surroundings transformed into snapshots of disquieting strangeness. The further the familiar urban hustle and bustle of New York retreats into the distance, the more the Looking Glass is breached. A low alien hum leaks through the commonplace, coating it in a flowering monotone psychedelia - the acid sullied with heroin’s dull bite. Reality is left behind as “Passaic center loomed like a dull adjective.” He reconsiders; “Actually, Passaic center was no center—it was instead a typical abyss or an ordinary void.”

Highway machinery, abandoned by workers for the weekend, brings to mind “mechanical dinosaurs stripped of their skin.” Particles of sand “blazed under a bleakly glowing sun” in a children’s sandbox, suggesting “the sullen dissolution of entire continents, the drying up of oceans.” The photos which make up the other half of the piece emphasise the ominously pedestrian nature of his surroundings; an oil derrick, a bridge captured at a slightly off-kilter angle, the aforementioned sandbox becoming in the harsh sunlight a “map of infinite disintegration and forgetfulness.” In approaching the Passaic through the lens of the paranoiac, however, he imbues his surroundings with an authority otherwise denied them by those hurrying blinkered through their surroundings. Whilst the view may not entirely be one appreciated, it is at least one acknowledged.

This dislocation between the intended purpose of a structure or landscape and the fashion in which the beholder receives it, a playful treatise on the construct of aesthetic and cultural value, is a thread also to be found running through the photography of Peter Mitchell. Following on from a major retrospective of his work at Leeds Art Gallery last year, Mitchell’s work can be seen adorning a run of Welcome shop boards in a quintessentially Yorkshire collaboration - artist and shop connected by an appreciation for architectural detail and of the communities nurtured by the twisting, rain-scoured streets of Leeds. With a body of work rooted in the architecture, people and social history of Leeds, his work as a delivery driver in the 1970s and 80s saw him well placed to document changes being wrought upon a post-industrial landscape which would feel entirely apposite were Smithson to shift his journey across the Atlantic. Passaic’s history is also one of industry, of unionisation and of neglect by successive governments with their attention directed elsewhere.

From the elegiac coverage of the demolition of Quarry Hill Flats in Memento Mori to the playful ‘aliens visiting Leeds POV’ framework of A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, Mitchell records a Leeds in constant flux; a post-industrial sprawl emerging from the trauma of the Thatcher years and finding its place as a modern metropolis (with all the positive and negative aspects that place-finding encompasses). Passaic according to Smithson “...seems full of “holes” compared to New York City, which seems tightly packed and solid, and those holes in a sense are the monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures.” In much the same way, the story which plays out amongst the rubble of Quarry Hill is one crowded with the dreams of those who resided within the building’s walls, despite the almost total lack of human figures within its pages. Elsewhere in his oeuvre, boarded up windows and piles of rubble clearly showcase the socio-economic circumstances in which he developed his craft, as well as highlighting an eye empathetic to the plight of the dispossessed. In Mitchell’s own words, “Times change and I know there was no point in keeping Quarry Hill Flats. But what it stood for might have been worth remembering.”

Thoresby and Victoria Houses, 1975. Photograph: © Peter Mitchell

Smithson’s surroundings during his brown belt pilgrimage “...seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is—all the new construction that would eventually be built.” Rather than the slow disintegration undergone via a process of weathering and wear and tear, the buildings rose into ruin; “This anti-romantic mise-en-scene suggested the discredited idea of time and many other “out of date” things.” It is hard not to see his ‘Utopia minus a bottom’ (“no past - just what passes for a future”) on the approach to Leeds Art Gallery from almost any direction, weaving through the yellow foam tubes which cocoon the lower reaches of scaffolding as the continuous clang of metal piping and rumble of jackhammers and baritone hum of generators are raised in a citywide chorus, a hymn to the relentless march of progress.

But, if Smithson is the documenter of discredited time, then perhaps we can see Mitchell - once described as the Eugène Atget of Leeds - as the corrective scholar restoring that temporal continuity. Family businesses disappear as the city’s development overtakes them, the momentum of urban regeneration inexorably builds, but his photographs afford these physical spaces a much longer metaphysical lifespan. Community is foregrounded amongst the seemingly impeccable work of the developers. A family gather in a concrete garden amongst the tenements, saris bright and prominent against the red brick surrounding them; a group of skateboarders bedecked in the cutting edge of 80s fashion, including G&S gloves and takeaway box kneepads, pose next to the long gone Pig & Whistle banks; shopkeepers stand proudly in front of their premises, below walls painted with signs advertising long-gone businesses; builders stand proudly amongst the demolished ruins of the Quarry Hill Flats; at the crossroads of the physical, the cultural and the social, his work juxtaposes the Ozymandian decline of once vital economic and architectural trends with the human stories behind them. A clear love of the city is brimming over and spilling from those piles of crumbling, porous red brick which dot his scenes, mounds of Proustian metaphor for anyone who has called those rows of terraced houses of the North their home.

In one photo from 1974, the husband and wife proprietors of T.B. Hudson News stand outside a premises split asunder. On one side, the soot-blackened brick of the old Seacroft Chapel looms over the shop. On the other a gravel and weed-strewn space appears in lieu of half the building, which comes to an abruptly jagged end. “Bring back the sunshine” chirps a bright yellow poster next to a window displaying a range of sweets jars. The couple in their doorway, produce still stubbornly displayed next to them, speak of human resilience in the face of a rapidly changing urban environment. As Mitchell said of his work in a recent Q&A“...it was sort of important that it was the owner of the building or at least somebody that worked in that building that mattered.” (In a serendipitous turn of events Chapel FM, the arts space which now occupies the old chapel, played host in 2021 to an exhibition of Peter Mitchell’s work. Whether someone had the wherewithal to take a photo of him standing next to the building at the time, I don’t know.)

Early in Smithson’s journey, as he wanders along the banks of the Passaic, he watches the bridge “...rotate on a central axis in order to allow an inert rectangular shape to pass with its unknown cargo. The Passaic (West) end of the bridge rotated south, while the Rutherford (East) end of the bridge rotated north; such rotations suggested the limited movements of an outmoded world. “North'' and “South” hung over the static river in a bi-polar manner.” He suggests that we refer to this bridge, with its unreliable cardinal points, as the “Monument of Dislocated Directions.”

Mitchell’s career, in his quest to discover the unfamiliar in what is, on the surface, quotidian, has often found him in the perfect place and time to capture similar monuments. His work as a whole presents a visual meditation on the labyrinthine cultural, political and economic ginnels and snickets which have shaped the city of Leeds. The photo which adorns the board - funfair ride operator Francis Gavan on Woodhouse Moor in 1977 - was shot in an area familiar to anyone who has spent time at Hyde Park (which means pretty much every skateboarder to visit Leeds in the last 20 years.) Stood in front of a packed down ghost train, surrounded by churned up grass and discarded food wrappers as those familiar red brick terraces snake behind him into the distant grey skies, it is an image which speaks of the transient nature of our pleasures. From the proud grin on Gavan’s face we know the fair has been a success, the residents of Hyde Park presumably having embraced the fleeting joy which has visited the patch of wasteland; much as we, with the ever changing cityscape seeing spots demolished, rebuilt and replaced, do as skateboarders.