Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever

Mitchell’s photographs of urban decay and the demolition of buildings in Leeds over the past 50 years show a world now vanished, but his empathy for his subjects shines through

Left: Peter Mitchell, Francis Gavan, Ghost Train Ride, Woodhouse Moor, Leeds, Spring 1986, © Peter Mitchell. Right: Peter Mitchell, The Kitson House telephone, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978 © Peter Mitchell.

The Photographers’ Gallery, London
7 March –15 June 2025

by DAVID TRIGG

The British curator Val Williams once described Peter Mitchell (b1943) as “a narrator of who we were, a chaser of a disappearing world”. While this is accurate, the Leeds-based photographer, who has spent more than five decades documenting the evolving post-industrial landscape of his adopted home city, refers to himself simply as “a man of the pavement”, reflecting his street-level sensibility and commitment to quotidian subjects. For Mitchell, photography is all about coincidences, those spontaneous moments that no amount of planning can manufacture. Many of his pictures in this modest retrospective are the result of serendipitous encounters, and although there are numerous scenes of urban decay, there is also humour, joy and humanity. Above all, his pictures reveal a deep empathy for his subjects, whether they be dilapidated buildings, proud shopkeepers, or even raggedy scarecrows.

Peter Mitchell, Mrs. McArthy & her daughter, Sangley Road, Catford, London, 1975. © Peter Mitchell.

Born in Eccles, near Manchester, Mitchell moved to south-east London during the second world war. After leaving school at 16, he trained as a cartographic draughtsman, working for the Ministry of Housing and Local Government before securing a place at Hornsey College of Art in 1967. It was here that he picked up a camera for the first time, though it wasn’t until 1972, when he had moved to Leeds, that he began pursuing photography seriously. His job as a delivery driver took him all over the city, where he witnessed and documented a rapidly changing urban environment. Slum clearances were in progress, old Victorian red-brick buildings were being demolished and new modernist blocks erected in their place.

Peter Mitchell, Ready mixed Concrete Ltd., Elland Road, Leeds, 1977. © Peter Mitchell.

Today, Mitchell is regarded as one of the most important early British colour photographers of the 1970s and 80s. His work opened the door for others such as Martin Parr, Tom Wood and Anna Fox. Although colour was nothing new at the time, its use in a fine art context – where black-and-white was de rigueur – was still frowned on because of its association with commercial advertising, fashion and snapshot photography. In November 1979, he staged the first colour photography show in the UK, A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, at Impressions Gallery, York. Comprising 65 pictures taken across Leeds and the surrounding area, the landmark exhibition – restaged for this retrospective – was inspired by Nasa’s Viking programme, which saw two space probes successfully land on Mars in 1976 and search for life. Mounted in bright red frames, each image is bordered with fake co-ordinates and scientific measurements, suggesting a Martian-eye survey of the northern English city.

Peter Mitchell, Max Babbin, Vulcan Street, Leeds, 1979. © Peter Mitchell.

The conceptual staging was, and remains, extremely quirky. As Martin Parr said of the show: “No one knew exactly what to say or how to react, apart from with total bewilderment.” While Mitchell’s Martian ruse still feels gimmicky, his once mundane views of Leeds now seem strange and unknowable; the erstwhile shops, pubs, hand-painted signage, factories, warehouses and homes appear to hail from an irretrievably distant time, if not another world altogether. The project captures a city on the verge of change and, in some cases, collapse. One mournful picture shows a block of flats on the Quarry Hill housing estate soon before their demolition. The four flagpoles on its roof, which for years had remained empty, fly with semaphore flags installed by Mitchell and his wife. They read “GOODBYE WORLD”.

Peter Mitchell, Scarecrow 28. © Peter Mitchell.

Some of the people in Mitchell’s photographs seem all too aware of his 1950s Hasselblad camera, such as the two middle-aged women standing outside a tired-looking cinema in Two Anonymous Ladies (1976). As with many images in this show, the shot looks staged but, according to Mitchell, the pedestrians had simply stopped to ask him what he was up to. Their curiosity mirrors his own sense of inquisitiveness, which led him into all manner of intriguing situations and encounters. Take for example The Porsche (1975), in which a group of long-haired bikers congregate in front of a Victorian end terrace painted with a racing bike mural. The scene, which Mitchell stumbled across quite by accident, is filled with tension. “One guy was sitting on his bike and another bloke behind him was threatening somebody,” he recalled. “I didn’t want to interrupt, so I said: ‘I’ll just take a picture.’”

Peter Mitchell, The Sir Yank’s Heavy Disco, Harehills Avenue, Leeds, 1978 © Peter Mitchell.

Other subjects barely notice the photographer at all. In Sir Yank’s Heavy Disco (1978) a group of Rastafari youth crowd around homemade speakers piled up on the pavement outside a suburban home, power cables seemingly running from every window. They are apparently oblivious to Mitchell, who captured the noisy gathering during the annual Chapeltown Carnival. Similarly, How Many Aunties? (1978) offers a candid view of a local Sikh wedding celebration in a backstreet near Mitchell’s home. A crowd of women have poured out of a terraced house, preparing for a group photograph while turbaned men wait patiently with cameras in hand, unaware of Mitchell’s presence. Such moments, happened on by chance, form the backbone of his socially engaged practice, which intimately chronicles a bygone era in Yorkshire’s largest city.

Peter Mitchell, ‘How many Aunties?’, Back Hares Mount, Leeds, 1978. © Peter Mitchell.

There are some subjects that Mitchell returned to time and time again. From the early 1970s to the 2010s, he photographed Francis Gavan, a fairground showman who brought his homespun ghost train to Woodhouse Moor in Leeds every year, much to the delight of local schoolchildren. One shot of the ghoulish attraction from 1988 is framed in a vintage undertaker’s noticeboard complete with rubber bats. Another, depicting Gavan standing amid the ride’s decrepit remains in 2004, features a hand-drawn mount decorated with cavorting skeletons – a testament to Mitchell’s penchant for eccentric modes of presentation. After Gavan’s death, Mitchell salvaged fragments of the ride, including its huge skull, which currently resides in his cellar. “Everything dies in the end, even ghost trains,” he has said.

Peter Mitchell, Priestly House, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978. © Peter Mitchell.

Among the most poignant works here are those documenting the decline and demolition of Quarry Hill, a mighty art deco housing estate built in Leeds in the 1930s and once the largest social housing complex in the UK. Despite being modelled on the Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna, by the mid-1970s the 13 blocks were badly deteriorated and largely deserted. Mitchell spent five years documenting the crumbling estate, from rows of smashed windows and half-demolished buildings to the creepy interiors of abandoned flats, some still containing furniture and even items of clothing. Whereas some pictures possess a serene stillness, others show the ravages of the wrecking ball. In one forlorn scene, Oastler House has had its front ripped off to reveal the gutted interiors of individual flats, their wallpaper the only remaining sign of a human presence.

The past was being demolished but so, too, was a utopian dream, one that had by then become a troubling nightmare. In recording the demise of this once grand project and many other buildings across Leeds, Mitchell’s project is a powerful reminder of the fate of all architecture as well as our own mortality. As he once put it: “The microbes of time are at work, and all that is solid melting.”