There’s wallpaper hanging above the sink. Really, they’re scraps overlaying each other: an uneven edge here, a peeling corner there. There’s a crooked mirror dangling over the cold tap.
And in front is a figure that commands the kitchen. Brow raised, eyes cast down and the ash on his cigarette lengthens as he contemplates the four cards held in his hands. His cap is shapeless and his cuffs frayed – these are clothes that have seen the passing of time. But his face is uncreased, his ears not yet grown into, his hands still plump with youth.
‘Cuddles playing cards’ is taken from Tish Murtha’s 1981 Youth Unemployment series, which features in the Close to Home exhibition on show at Gateshead’s Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art until 4th April 2027. This image has been referenced as symbolising a generation stifled by the grip of Margaret Thatcher’s steel hand in a velvet glove. The peeling wallpaper indicative of poverty, the dangling cigarette a symbol of cynicism towards an uncertain future, the cards implying sheer boredom.
Indeed, Youth Employment was cited on 8 February 1981 during a parliamentary debate on governmental response to rising redundancies. At the time, national unemployment was at 9.6%, jumping from 6.8% in 1980. In Newcastle, it was in excess of 15%, with Dale Campbell-Savours MP for Workington suggesting that “in parts of my constituency unemployment must be running at 30 to 40%”. A narrative about a generation of youth without a future seems fitting, then.
But Murtha’s intention wasn’t to create sweeping photonarratives destined for the halls of Westminster. Born in South Shields and raised in Newcastle’s West End, she documented the people she grew up around: their creativity, joy and spirit.
She knew Cuddles, and sought to capture his wit and premature wisdom. The economic hardship was peripheral to his personality, and something that far predated Thatcher’s government. As local community newspaper Roundabout declared at the time: ‘economic depression is nothing new in Newcastle’. And the cigarette? Not so much a token of hopelessness as one of normality. After all, everyone smoked in 1980s Newcastle.
Close to Home shows Youth Unemployment alongside three other series by Murtha: Elswick Kids (1978), Save Scotswood Works (1979) and Elswick Revisited (1987-91). Her 1979 work focuses on the communities whose livelihoods depended on the industrial engineering factory on the banks of the River Tyne.
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It was earmarked for closure, which threatened around 800 jobs and prompted resistance from locals. The collection includes images of these protests: police horses flanking a march with participants holding a banner from which the series takes its title; a man with a knowing smirk and a glimmering eye as he stands next to graffiti reading ‘BOXALL KNOWS F_ _ _ ALL’.
It also includes men in their overalls, dwarfed by the steel structures they have forged, a tired figure in a stark shower at the end of a shift, as well as shots of the community outside of the workshop. Down the club, the band is playing, there are old friends confiding in one another, a couple kissing and a lone gentlemanman, dressed in shirt, tie, jumper and shell jacket raising his glass, cigarette tucked between index and middle finger.
The title ‘Saving Scotswood Works’ is singular in its message. The collection of imagery shares a broader story. Does it explain why Scotswood Works should be saved – to preserve the community that it employs? Perhaps it pushes against its title: isn’t this community defined by so much more than its employer?
Scotswood Works closed in 1979, indicative of a wider trend throughout the manufacturing, mining and shipbuilding industries. Doxford was one such shipbuilding company, sitting on the southern bank of the River Wear at Pallion, Sunderland.
In 1980, it manufactured the last of its oil engines and closed entirely in 1988. Now, the former yard is being developed into a film and TV production site called Crown Works Studio. The initiative is part of a larger scheme, announced by North East Mayor Kim McGuinness earlier this year, to invest £104 million into the region’s creative industries.
This funding is committed to an open-air performance space at Gateshead Quays, as well as grants for smaller cultural venues and professional support for local creatives among other things.
Crown Works Studio alone expects to create of over 8,000 jobs, with McGuinness citing her desire to change the “huge barriers working class young people from the north face when trying to make it in music and film” voiced by creatives such as Sam Fender, whose People Watching album art is taken from the Tish Murtha Archive.
The creativity of Fender and Murtha is so entrenched in Newcastle’s working class culture, while the contrast between Sunderland’s concrete centre and the nearby natural coastlines served as inspiration for Mackem designer Louise Trotter during her tenure as Lacoste’s Creative Director.
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Increased funding may make working class North Eastern creatives the norm, rather than the exception. But could ‘bringing culture’ to the North East threaten to overwrite the northeastern culture that shaped Fender, Murtha and Trotter?
A cultural renaissance akin to that proposed by McGuinness has been playing out in East London since the 2012 Olympic Games. Over the last decade The Mayor of London has invested £600 million into East Bank, which houses UAL’s London College of Fashion, Sadler’s Wells East and V&A East, with BBC Music Studios expected to open next year.
Stratford’s redevelopment has been praised for driving a surge in London’s tourism and international spending. Yet its glossy highrise has emptied the area of its locals and Newham council now has the second largest social housing waiting list in London – three times higher than the city average.
The next decade will determine whether Scotswood follows Stratford. But social upheaval, like the economic hardship of the 20th century, is nothing new to the North East.
Cuddles is older now – he’s probably grown into his ears and he might have quit smoking so he could see the grandkids grow up. But he and the generations that follow him will always have the guts, grit and gumption that drench Murtha’s images.
It would be nice if they don’t have to rely on those characteristics, though. It would be nice if they could continue to live and work in the neighbourhoods that shape them and that they similarly shape. It would be nice if they could stay close to home.
The Close to Home exhibition in Baltic’s Level 3 gallery marks the first time four major series by celebrated documentary photographer Tish Murtha will be shown together in the North East, alongside a newly commissioned body of work by Newcastle–based artist Kuba Ryniewicz.
Header image: Cuddles playing cards. Tish Murtha © Ella Murtha, All rights reserved
