Michael Kenna was born in Widnes, then a small industrial town in northwest England, and grew up in a working-class Irish-Catholic family. Before he left for the United States in the late 1970s, he had already begun photographing the places he knew. The pictures gathered in Northern England 1983–1986 were made on return visits to Lancashire and Yorkshire in the early 1980s. The two counties share a border and the Pennines, the mountain spine that helps to produce the heavy rain to which the rise of cotton and wool mills, canals, railways, chimneys and terraced housing has long been attributed. By the time Kenna photographed there, that textile economy had gone into steep decline. He worked by day and at night, and the resulting images record a region in the middle of that transformation.

What distinguishes this body of work is that much of it remained unprinted for decades. Many negatives stayed in storage until the pandemic lockdown gave Kenna the time to search his archive and print forgotten images in his own darkroom. Some photographs from the series are well known, but a large number are published here for the first time.

The seventy-five plates, printed in quadratone on textured art paper, are bound in cloth-covered boards whose physical character recalls the period. Dr. Ian B. Glover contributes an introductory text, placing the photographs in the context of Kenna’s early career and the industrial landscape that shaped them. A book that brings together known and unknown work from a formative series, it offers a focused reference for readers following Kenna’s development or the photographic record of post-industrial Britain.