L.S.Lowry and Bill Brandt exerted such a strong influence on my early photographic work that it left me with a lasting legacy in pictures of Britain’s Industrial past. Mostly they were taken in the North of England, in Liverpool or Manchester, or in Sheffield and the environs of Bradford and Leeds, places like Halifax or Burnley, Keighley or Bolton where I found strong, often brutal mill buildings and chimneys, cobbled streets and row upon row of terraced housing. I grew up with an industrial setting in Reading, surrounded by factory chimneys, gasworks, the canal and lots of railway yards, which inevitably coloured my way of ‘seeing’ and what I chose to portray.