This image was taken after my end-of-year exams at the end of my first year at Swansea University, in Wales, UK, (where I studied geology), when I thought I would explore the old docks at Swansea that were (unknowingly to me) about to be redeveloped. At the time, South Wales was in recession, its rich industrial heritage crumbling and no longer the prosperous industrial centre that it once was. I had taken my end-of-year exams and had time on my hands with no lectures so thought that I would explore the docks, having read how the poet, local lad Dylan Thomas, used to play truant from school there.
The docks were a scene of devastation – they were still operational but only just. Coal exports were minimal, the main export seemed to be scrap metal. Many once grand warehouses were empty and abandoned, the railway sidings had ancient rolling stock plastered with ‘condemned’ notices painted on the sides, and the few workers and stevedores present were not bothered by my presence, except for a couple who didn’t mind me being there with my camera so long as I didn’t capture their faces, as “they might be recognised and wanted elsewhere…”
I came across this magnificent warehouse of corrugated iron gently rusting away, but optimistically displaying a ‘For Sale’ sign. Such was the corrosion of the steel, one could see right through the building. The day was one of those overcast days, where everything is dull and flat with a plain grey sky. I had only had my first SLR camera for a year, bought secondhand with a present of £25 from my grandparents for my 18th Birthday. The camera was a Praktika Nova B with a standard Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 50mm f/2.8 lens. I bought it for £18 from the camera shop that used to be in the High St in Walton on Thames where I lived at the time. I knew nothing about cameras, and truth be told, I didn’t really know what to spend my birthday money on, but I had always envied the few people I knew of at school who had ‘proper’ cameras – usually a Praktica or Zenith – and their ability to take ‘proper’ photographs that they developed and printed themselves in the school’s Photographic Society darkroom.
So off I went to university with my first proper camera, I joined the Photographic Society because I could get cheap Ilford B&W film, and use the darkroom in the Student Union building for 50p for 5 hours at a time to develop and print my own film! So whilst some of my friends would spend their student grants on hi-fi components, records, wetsuits and surfboards, mine was spent on photographic film, paper and chemicals, experimenting and learning (and like everyone else of course, on copious amounts of alcohol as well).
What I particularly like about this photograph that makes it a long time personal favourite of mine is that when I first saw the warehouse, it looked so forlorn, decrepit and abandoned, yet perhaps with a faint glimmer of hope from the bright red ‘For Sale’ sign… and quite by chance as I composed the image, this old man in a suit and flatcap shuffled past walking his dog, shoulders slumped and head down as if in a deep slough of despondency, perfectly summarising the general atmosphere of decay amongst the docks. And yet that faint glimmer of hope grew, because by the mid 1980s the transformation had begun to what is now the Swansea Marina, with apartment blocks, hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and cafes.