Love and loss in the time of industry

Janire Najera and Matt Wright with a 360-degree, multi-media part of the Ghosts in Armour exhibition

IT WAS in the autumn of last year that something quite extraordinary happened at The Riverfront in Newport.

Community arts and local history projects are quite often derided (sometimes with some justification) for their failure to engage with the very people they are aimed at. Yet here, in the bowels Newport’s new arts centre, found right next to the Usk, the public began arriving in increasing numbers. Some greeted and hugged long-lost friends, some returned time and again, some even wept. All of them reminisced.

Ghosts in Armour - a photographic documentary of the Whiteheads steelworks site in Newport, just prior to its demolition, that swiftly became a social history study – was a sublimely executed exhibition, particularly as it was a first for curators and project leaders Janire Najera and Matt Wright. But that wasn’t the principal reason that show became such a moving experience.

Established in the 1920s and employing up to 3,000 people during its heyday in the 1970s, Whiteheads was closed in 2005 and scheduled to be cleared in 2008 and replaced with an extension to the Royal Gwent Hospital. During that time, an estimated 200,000 workers passed through its gates, including generation after generation of local families, whose lives took place in the streets and terraces laid out around the factory. It was quintessential British heavy manufacturing, with social clubs, sports teams, friendships and marriages springing from the steelworks and growing up within the community it had created.

Whiteheads as it was left was fairly unique. It hadn’t been vandalised or damaged in any way, while large parts of it looked like its workers had got up and left one day, never to return. Tea cups and papers were left, along with the contents of lockers. But this was no Mary Celeste. “We just got this overwhelming feeling the first time we went in there,” said Matt. “The atmosphere – it was almost indescribable.”

“I think what hit us first was the silence,” adds Janire. “You walk down a corridor and through double doors and suddenly, you’re in a room that’s the size of three football pitches. It’s very long, but the only life in there was seagulls and the occasional fox.”

It was this source material, some of which was photographed, and some of which was taken out of the site, that allowed Janire, Matt and other photographers that joined them on the project to vividly recreate life in the factory, down to the smells and the sounds, as well as the sights. And it was this element of the exhibition that brought its former workers to The Riverfront, and prompted them to share their stories of life at Whiteheads. In the process, they enhanced the project and helped to give it the legs so that it is now spreading across Europe to other former steel towns.

And it all started so innocuously. “I’d been walking past this factory and eying it up for three or four years,” said Matt. “When Janire came in and said she was going in to photograph the place.” Both were photography students in the city, and Matt managed to blag his way along, too. “It was supposed to be a two-hour shoot,” said Janire, but it very quickly become apparent that repeat visits were required. “We’d not touched the edges in an afternoon shoot.”

Their next step was to prove crucial. Two former workers, Kieron Kinsey and Terry Anderson, had been kept on to look after the Whiteheads site, and to pass on their comprehensive knowledge of the factory to the demolition company when it arrived, assisting in identifying where gas mains were, for example. “One of the hardest tasks was convincing Terry and Kieron of what we wanted to do,” said Matt. “You’d be with them at the main gate and they’d be on the phone to an old colleague, saying ‘I know this sounds bloody crazy, but bear with me…’. Because the pair of them were so well respected in the community, they were instrumental in convincing people to come in to talk to us.”

The pair led on different aspects of the project. While Matt concentrated on the images, Janire spent time in the library and in researching Whiteheads’ history. “Terry and Kieron found the people. When you open a show, you have a lot of dignitaries. We had a few of those but, for us, the stars of the show were the people who had told us their stories, who had helped us understand the building and what had gone on there,” said Janire. “People who worked there had a love for the place. It was part of their family life.”

Matt and Janire faced a tough battle to stage the exhibition. There was funding available, but it couldn’t be released immediately and the clock was ticking downwards to demolition. An 11th hour attempt to delay the wrecking ball found intransigent contractors set on observing the deadline. While Ghosts in Armour (its name is taken from the Dylan Thomas poem, I, In My Intricate Image) received some publicity, the phenomenon it provoked was sown purely by word-of-mouth.

“We had 60, 70, 80-year-olds coming in and bursting into tears. They were being confronted with all these memories. They were finding notes they’d written on their first day in the factory,” said Matt. Artefacts of all shapes and sizes, stored away in drawers that had come from Whiteheads added to the multi-media show. Overalls, goggles, and even pieces of abandoned machinery completed the recreation.

In among those artefacts was a set a drawings. “Whiteheads had a really impressive drawing room,” said Janire. “One of the guys had worked there for 20 years and when they shut the place, they told him to burn all the drawings. They wanted it done because they were commercially sensitive, but they were this guy’s life’s work. Then he kept some of them in another room in the hope to be rescued and we found them in one of our explorations. We displayed the drawings in the original desk where they were kept and when the worker saw them at the exhibition you can imagine the satisfaction it created for him.”

In among the personal effects that eventual team of 20 found at the site was a series of photos of workers in Whiteheads. While Janire, who studied documentary photography, set about trying to track them down with Terry and Kieron’s help, Matt, an photographic art student, identified where they were taken and both of them created a series of projections in those places in order to shoot them in position.

The photo that ended in a meeting

“I had been looking at these guys’ faces for six months and then, one day, one of them appeared at The Riverfront. The hairs on the back of my neck rose up immediately, I recognised him on the spot,” said Matt. “He was able to give us so much more information and we were able to find out a lot more and add that to what we already knew. All the time we are still learning new things about life at Whiteheads.”

“The reception was amazing,” added Janire. “It went from a part-time project to a seven-days-a-week, 16-hour-day documentary. People were saying ‘We don’t know how you’ve done it, but it smells and sounds just like the place’. We had the grandson and granddaughter of WD Whiteheads, who had opened the factory, come along. They saw what we were doing in the local paper. While they were there, they had people coming up to them and shaking their hands, saying ‘thank you so much for what your grandfather did’.”

“It was really heart-warming and incredibly emotional,” Matt said. “We used to cry every day. You would have people bump into each other after not having met for 25 years. It was lovely to see. A lot of them had felt disengaged and lost once they left there.”

Both Janire and Matt felt sure that the depth of feeling they’d uncovered in Newport would be found in other steel towns throughout Europe, and they have continued working on the theme, setting up a similar collective-based project with local people in the Ruhr area of Germany, where former industrial sites have been retained and reinvented, often as arts facilities. But the pair are spending considerable amounts of time moving between Newport and Bilbao, where one of the largest steel mills in Spain has closed down and another industrial area called Zorrotzaurre is being prepared to become part of the city’s regeneration, which has already seen the establishment of Frank Gehry’s worldwide-feted Guggenheim Museum there. Janire and Matt are particularly interested in recording the stories of steel workers during this period of transformation.

Elements of the original Riverfront exhibition can still be seen at the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea, and the duo are beginning to look forward to staging a new show in Newport at the time the Ryder Cup is staged next year.

But the spirit of the project, discovered almost by accident by Janire and Matt, remains the central focus of Ghosts in Armour. “It’s quite trendy these days to photograph ruins, but we felt we really needed to get into the walls of Whiteheads, to discover what really made it tick” said Matt. “And the more we got in, the more we found and the more we wanted to know. It’s our obsession.

“It may be an old-fashioned view, but I think we really lost something in this country with the end of heavy industry. I understand the economic reasons why it happened, but its easy to forget the cohesion it brought, how people’s lives were sewn together by the places in which they worked. And in doing so, they created communities – real communities. I feel its a real shame that we’ve lost some of that, and that’s what drives us to document as much as we can, before it passes out of living memory.”

- GIA Elements 2 is on show at the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea until November 15. Visit the website for further updates on exhibitions.