Going Back Brockens

Much of northeast England is celebrating industrial heritage this month, with the 200th anniversary of the world’s first railway line building up an impressive head of steam. Yet 2025 also represents 40 years since the bitter end of the miners’ strike and the subsequent unravelling of another proud tradition of working life.

Going Back Brockens, combining work by Mark Hudson, Narbi Price and Carl Joyce, offers a powerful reflection on the fate of former pit villages. It recently began its fourth iteration at Sunderland Museum.

After previous shows in a warehouse, a Gala day tent and a church, this was the first time for the show in a formal gallery setting. And so the vibe changes. There’s a hush around the room that gives the urgency of Mark Hudson’s interviews space to resonate. Recorded 30 years ago as part of the research for Coming Back Brockens, Mark’s literary portrait of a pit village coming to terms with the loss of its pit, these voices of the past are insistent. Horden, and by implication the northeast as a whole, is their story; it’s an indictment of years of neglect that language of solidarity and struggle feels alien. The ideals haven’t so much faded as been smothered by an on-going shrug of official shoulders.

The fire and passion of the voices contrasts with Narbi Price’s depopulated canvases. A triptych of seascapes, The Axe Came Down and That Was It, Starting to Go Back In, and We Always Thought We Would Actually Win, here presented side by side, hit differently in a new space. Across the hallway, their cousins by L.S. Lowry reverberate around them: two very different artists in very different ages confronting the same expanse of ocean void. Price’s solitary rock stack suddenly seems to stand in for Lowry’s mysterious monoliths in a manner far less apparent at the show’s opening.

Other connections emerge: the lonely bench with its floral tributes in I’ll Never, Ever be the Same Again feels like a continuation of Price’s Covid-era collection of taped-off seats. More fanciful, perhaps, stark, leafless woodland scenes could almost recall parts of the Russian 19th-century landscape school, with drifts of snow replaced by wisps of abandoned carrier bags.

Empty landscapes, paths to nowhere, bricked up doors and boarded up windows, all reflect Price’s preoccupation with a lost legacy. It’s a world seen by those who came after, the ones who can’t recall the rumble of industry and the heavy tread of miners’ boots. Coupled with Hudson’s disembodied voices, these people-free canvases create an eerie, empty world.

The effect might be ghostly, but the third phase of the exhibition, Carl Joyce’s series of six films, Where We Belong, explore the post-industrial world where he himself grew up. Six contrasting voices from Horden and Peterlee, Easington and Murton, inject life and contemporary vision into the show.

Their stories are varied: the teenage girl eager to get away to bigger and brighter things, the 40-something man rediscovering a pride in his hometown amid all its flaws; the incomer, part of a surprising and buoyant Nigerian community, and the old timer from the pithead offices remembering how it used to be. Collectively, they flesh out those faceless voices of the 1990s and populate some of the empty space that looms over Price’s paintings, drawing strands together into a satisfying, thought-provoking and multi-layered whole.

Want more about northeast England and its mining heritage? Check out some of these:

• Ensemble '84, a fresh new theatre company in Horden;
• An anthology of visionary verse from William Martin;
• Dog racing in Wheatley Hill;
• Another of Carl's films, this time about the demolition of the School on Seaside Lane in Easington Colliery.