Between 1981 and 1988, British photographer John Myers conducted a rigorous topographical survey of the Black Country, a historic English heartland defined by heavy metal manufacturing. During the early 1980s, the region suffered severe economic disruption marked by a cascade of corporate bankruptcies and soaring unemployment. Myers turned his lens toward the physical consequences of this crisis, recording an environment caught in the midst of permanent transformation.
His photographs document the rapid unraveling of an industrial topography rooted in the Industrial Revolution. Heavy industrial infrastructure—foundries, forges, and steelworks—faced closure or swift demolition, unable to readily adapt into light commercial spaces. Myers tracked the emergence of modern housing estates, enterprise zones, and retail parks, alongside surviving businesses that retooled their operations to warehouse and distribute imported goods rather than manufacture them domestically.
Published in 2019 by RRB Photobooks, this 164-page hardcover marks the third and concluding volume in the publisher’s multi-part series of Myers’s work, following *The Portraits* and *Looking at the Overlooked*. Together, the three publications form a catalogue raisonné of his complete photographic output.
For collectors of British documentary photography and post-industrial landscape studies, *The End of Industry* provides an essential, sober record of regional economic shift. Myers avoids dramatic spectacle, relying instead on precise compositional detachment to preserve the disappearing spaces of British labor and the rapid rise of late-twentieth-century consumer architecture.
