Simon Ford

Everyday Utopias Almshouses (Bowling Dye Works), West Bowling, Bradford, West Yorkshire. Social Housing, former site of Bowling Dye Works, Bradford, West Yorkshire. Bandstand under renovation, Centre Vale Park (for…

New project / work in progress: Everyday Utopias

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A walk along the former site of Llanwern steelworks Once a major centre of steel production in South Wales, the site has undergone significant contraction since its heyday. The blast furnace and hot strip mill—together known as the ‘heavy end’—were …

A photo / writing fragment about Llanwern steelworks, Newport, an Amazon distribution hub, Jeremy Deller and the 1984-85 miners’ strike.

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Former entrance to Marine Colliery, Cwm, Ebbw Vale This location was the site of a prolonged standoff between striking miners and police during the 1984–1985 miners’ dispute. During the confrontation, as one of these strikers, I remember we secured…

A photo and writing fragment about Marine Colliery and the picket-line during the 1984-85 miners’ strike.

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“…you can't make much of an alliance out of negatives; the only real basis of alliances is agreement on positive proposals for transcending the negatives.”

Raymond Williams, Decentralisation and the Politics of Place, 1984

The old Pillgwenlly library, Newport, South Wales The old Pillgwenlly Library, more commonly known as “Pill” in Newport, South Wales, stands as a monument to the struggles and aspirations of the working class. From the mid-nineteenth century, Pill…

A photo / writing fragment about Pillgwenlly library, Newport, the mantra “knowledge is power” and Walter Benjamin’s theory of redemption (or how to make history active).

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Armley House, Leeds

My practice uses landscape and photography to examine power, and to dissolve theory/practice divides in seeking alternative ways of knowing. Reclaiming what endures to reimagine futures beyond the logic of profit. Adorno / Benjamin—capital as natural-history.

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My short cut home, nature and Adorno’s concept of the non-identical A shortcut I sometimes take from Frizinghall station to my home follows the old road to Wind Hill. It feels like an ancient lane, a hollow way worn into the landscape, beginning at the edge of a ho…

A photo / writing fragment about my shortcut home, nature and Adorno's theory of the non-identical.

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It is the kind of question I ask myself constantly and is my fascination and trust in history. I believe capitalist history, as ongoing catastrophe, may demand new barbarism before opening a horizon of possibility. Pessimistic, I know, but such is the trajectory of human existence.

A wall on a council estate built by apprentices in 1948 I believe this wall, with its commemorative stone, was constructed by apprentice bricklayers as a training exercise in 1948. The estate, situated near Halifax in West Yorkshire, formed part of the …

A photo and writing fragment about a council estate in Halifax, "Operation Raise the Flag" and Walter Benjamin's notion of "profane illumination".

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I have ‘the brick’ for you.

Penarth, South Wales, yesterday.

@stevehanson.bsky.social, last week - the old clay quarry, Summit Brick Works, nr. Littleborough, from the Calderbrook Road.

Chronos and Kairos During a walk from Merthyr Tydfil to Abercynon along the Pendarren Tramroad—historically significant as the route of the first successful steam locomotive trial in 1804 between the Pendarren Ironwo…

A photo / writing fragment about instrumental time, natural time and inequality.
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Boy pulling a pony trap past the old slaughterhouse I encountered a boy—no more than fourteen or fifteen—near Harecroft drawing a two-wheeled horse trap, his slight frame wedged between the shafts where the horse ought to have been. He approached wi…

A photo / writing fragment about history, the materiality of language and landscape.
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Theodor W. Adorno’s visit to a colliery in the Ruhr, 1954. Adorno’s visit coincided with his efforts to establish the field of industrial sociology at the University of Frankfurt am Main. The photograph of that visit recalls for me my own time as a m…

A photo / writing fragment about Theodor W. Adorno’s visit to a colliery and my own experience working as a miner.
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Disused railway bridge near Pontypool, South Wales The railway bridge here belongs to the disused line between Pontypool and Blaenavon. Until the late 1950s, this route would have been busy with coal trains from the collieries at Talywain, Abersych…

A photo / writing fragment about history, landscape and popular culture.
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The Roger Stevens Building, University of Leeds In The Mass Ornament, Siegfried Kracauer contends that the modernist building, through its renunciation of embellishment, disavows a direct continuity with the subjectivities of the past. This nega…

A photo / writing fragment about
architectural embellishment, high modernism and lost optimism.
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Pithead Baths, Wyndham Colliery, Upper Ogmore Valley, South Wales, c.1928 The construction of pithead baths at collieries was a late arrival to industrial life in Britain. Until the 1920s, the idea that miners might wash before returning home was unusual, adopted only by…

A photo / writing fragment about pit-head baths, my own experience as a miner and the co-opting of community by the far-right.
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A collection bucket for the Liverpool dockworkers’ strike The collection bucket was used during the Liverpool dockworkers’ strike of 1995–1998 strike, specifically for a Christmas appeal in 1996. I encountered it recently at the home of a friend who…

A photo / writing fragment about the Liverpool dockworkers’ strike and art schools.
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Talking like we are now, as citizens, means the non-identical / utopian is not easily lost, and will continue to be the case, as it has been throughout the barbarism of history.

Adorno's point, as you know, is that the non-identical must be rediscovered at every stage of humanity, his project of negation—or thinking, if you like. But like you say, the present is lost and, in a generational sense, so is the future.

That is: all that the present disregards as irrelevant / dangerous, which the future will desperately need. All wrapped-up dialectically. The parting shots in Toward a New Manifesto I don’t think have lost their acuity.

the message / content = the non-identical, the bottle / form = the Utopian. TWA

This already seems like a message from the Stone Age.

Marx in mind here, and his musings how capital might destroy itself - including the inability to keep up with its own technological progress. Benjamin comes to mind too, and the Utopian applying of an ‘emergency brake’ on (capitalist) progress.

It is. If only as a message in a bottle to the future.

Hello Dick, I’m delighted you enjoyed what I’ve written. My aim has been to explore the pressing concerns of the present through reflections on my own past—though without slipping into nostalgia. What you say about the poetic and the economic dimensions of landscape resonates

deeply with me. In fact, it was the central concern of my PhD: how to represent the post-industrial landscape not only through empirical observation but also poetically—while still preserving the objective reality of how the land came to bear its current form. On a less

academic note, although still with your observation mind, I miss the tension between industrial history and nature that so profoundly shapes the landscape of South Wales; it’s a feeling I can’t quite shake. I’m also very taken with your paintings. They carry that aesthetic I

have greatly valued for some time: the British return to abstraction post WWII—brimming with hope, yet never free of doubt or questioning. And yes, I feel the same about @stevehanson.bsky.social‬ (just letting him know we’re talking about him behind his back. He’s an

extraordinary talent; I often describe him as a literary polymath—something remarkably rare today. All the very best, Simon.