Byker: From Here to Modernity

Northeast England has been home to some of the great visual chroniclers of post-industrial Britain. Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen is one of these photographers. Her newly rereleased book, Byker, is a warm but hard-edged record of a neighbourhood that is being demolished even as she captures her photographs.

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen came to Byker in Northeast England in 1969. “Walking down Janet Street on that first, soft Saturday morning in the late autumn, I was put under a spell,” she writes in the introduction to Byker. “That spell was to last ten year...

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