In Search of England / They don't play much cricket around here anymore.

documentary photo of Weston Super Mare, from the project, In Search of England, by David Cross, published in Humanity Online,

Photos & text by David Cross.

A search for the heartland.

Using the American road trip as example, I set out on limited budget to find what's left of my home country and to see, quite simply, what it looks like.
Having just made the switch to digital and colour photography what better to look at than the old country that I thought I knew so well. I had just seen the Martin Parr photos from the series The Last Resort, and was inspired to show a little more respect to the subjects I might encounter but knew also that colour would work due to the realism, also, the seaside resort is as good a place as anywhere to find England, or rather, what is left of it.

I wanted to know what the country looked like and how some of the places I had visited often as a child had changed. I fully expected them to have changed, as nothing stays the same for long, and a series of governments, all hell bent on destroying the country and its culture had already demolished much of the landscape - many of the areas I knew in my old hometown had been demolished and replaced with steel and glass, and this is nothing more than a veneer that masks new ways to take our money and destroy the culture.

What surprised me most of all was the consistency. The same problems seemed to leap out at me everywhere I went. The divide between rich and poor had not changed at all, but the distance between each had widened. Graffiti and other types of vandalism were rife and this isn't limited to mindless kids with too much time on their hands. Councils and the affluent also have had a foot in this, ugly buildings and endless new roads and housing estates have played a major roll in the defacing of the landscape. Millions of tax payer pounds have been wasted on regeneration, much of which will not stand the test of time, some of it hardly survived one winter before the cladding started to warp and the pavements began to wobble.

The most noticeable change was in the new demographic. There were times when I felt I wasn't even close to the heartland, but rather, in a different country entirely. There was a day in my original hometown where I was the only white person on the street. And on every street I walked. I didn't feel that I was in danger but certainly that I was endangered, about to be replaced. The suicidal empaths will disagree, but absolutely there are places where being white skinned and British, puts you in the minority. This may be an unfashionable thing to say, but there's nothing racist about simple observation. In fact, the opposite is true.

The photographs are a record of what I found, and of course that means the things that I found interesting enough to photograph. The selection published here are from a vast and growing archive, and I have been careful not to go too deep - several of the images that I have made need extra context, the average viewer would require leads so as to be understood properly, these will appear in the book that will be published when I feel that the project is as complete as can be. Photography, certainly documentary photography is a continuously moving vehicle which often has no beginning or end.
I am currently left feeling a little bewildered at what I witnessed and wonder how it will all pan out. Although nothing remains the same, at some levels nothing has changed. The poor remain poor and the government remains corrupt and no new King of the North is likely to change that anytime soon.