"The landscape around us is forever changing. Industry reaches fever pitch and dies away, the people who worked there leave. The buildings they lived in are abandoned. But they all leave behind stories. The mark we make on the land - for better or worse - through the ages is there for future generations to read, to understand, to make sense of."
So writes Marie Gardiner on her Substack Light & Letters. It's a passage that might serve as a commentary on Jon Pountney's series Allure Of Ruins, but it was actually penned to explain/frame her new photozine Changing Landscapes: Ruins Of The North Pennines, available here. (In the zine itself, she deliberately leaves the pictures to speak for themselves.)
Gardiner's images of derelict stone buildings on open, desolate moorland prompt the viewer to ponder the same questions that preoccupied James Lacy in his book A World In Ruins: "Who lived there? Who worked there? Why did they leave? Where did they go? Where are they now?"
As Gardiner's passage at the start of this post suggests, Lacy's third question is perhaps the easiest to answer here: time simply moved on, industry dwindled to nothing, and workers had little option but to abandon a hard, remote existence in search of employment. Her images are a reminder that even places we now think of as remote and wild have been home to, and shaped by, human hand.
Ruins exert considerable power over our imaginations, and there's an undeniably poignant quality to these pictures of silent, crumbling structures trying to remain dignified in the face of the elements. But the zine is also a love letter to the bleak beauty of the North Pennines - not an area I know at all well, ridiculously, as someone who grew up in nearby Northumberland - and there is perhaps also a sense in which the landscape has triumphantly seen off intruders and trespassers, forcing them into retreat so it can be left in peace.
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