80s Youth Culture in a Dying English Industrial Town

Between 1979 and 1989, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Christo­pher John Ball doc­u­ment­ed the peo­ple of Black­burn, the Lan­cashire indus­tri­al town that shaped his ear­ly life and artis­tic eye, dur­ing a peri­od of deep social and eco­nom­ic change.

In his series, Black­burn: A Town and Its Peo­ple, Ball cap­tured the town’s work­ing-class indus­tri­al her­itage and the every­day lives of its res­i­dents, with a par­tic­u­lar focus on the local sub­cul­tures that emerged amid decline: punks, goths, new roman­tics, and oth­ers carv­ing out iden­ti­ties in the long shad­ow of dein­dus­tri­al­i­sa­tion.

The years Ball spent doc­u­ment­ing his town coin­cide with the col­lapse of Britain’s tra­di­tion­al man­u­fac­tur­ing base, when towns like Black­burn, once woven tight­ly into key glob­al indus­tries, were grap­pling with clo­sures, ris­ing unem­ploy­ment, and the ero­sion of com­mu­nal cer­tain­ties.

By the late 1970s, many of the fac­to­ries and mines that had defined Blackburn’s sky­line and social rhythms for over a cen­tu­ry were silent or in their final years. What replaced them was not pros­per­i­ty, but a long, uneven tran­si­tion marked by board­ed-up high streets, youth unem­ploy­ment, and a per­va­sive sense that the future was else­where.

Rather than pho­tograph­ing these changes sen­ti­men­tal­ly, Ball kept his lens trained on peo­ple as they were. It’s par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing how even in this town, style became a form of agency for the local youth.

It seems like all of the sub­jects in these pho­tos that belonged to a par­tic­u­lar sub­cul­ture had their own links to nation’s larg­er cul­tur­al cur­rents, find­ing inspi­ra­tion from what was hap­pen­ing in big­ger cities and re-deploy­ing that ener­gy in the North’s post-indus­tri­al streets.

While Ball most cer­tain­ly did­n’t set out to specif­i­cal­ly doc­u­ment the sub­cul­tures of his area, his most pro­found shots are nev­er­the­less of the var­i­ous youth under­cur­rents of Black­burn. The cloth­ing, hair­styles, and make­up unmis­tak­ably root the pho­tographs in their era, mak­ing them invalu­able visu­al records of region­al youth cul­ture in the ear­ly 1980s.

Beyond sub­cul­tures, these pho­tos also cap­ture qui­eter social rit­u­als that reveal how com­mu­ni­ty per­sist­ed even as uncer­tain­ty loomed, and they under­score an impor­tant truth: while indus­try declined, social life did not sim­ply dis­ap­pear.

Christo­pher John Bal­l’s pho­tog­ra­phy may have fad­ed into obscu­ri­ty had he him­self not made the effort to keep a pres­ence on the inter­net, and these are cer­tain­ly por­traits worth pre­serv­ing. In total, Ball cre­at­ed a total of some 900 shots of Black­burn and its peo­ple, which he has recent­ly fin­ished restor­ing and digi­tis­ing, with the intent of even­tu­al­ly donat­ing it to the town for safe­keep­ing.

A par­tial col­lec­tion of the pho­tos, pre­vi­ous­ly dis­played as a part of an exhi­bi­tion in 1985, can be pur­chased as a book and indi­vid­ual pho­tos (includ­ing his more recent work) can be pur­chased in the form of prints and oth­er prod­ucts through his store.