The Birmingham Inner Circle
In June the family of Nick Hedges announced that he had died aged 81. Nick was a brilliant documentary photographer, and a lovely man. To mark his passing we wanted to share the interview he did with us back in 2018 as part of our Birmingham ’68 project.
Although he has had a varied career spanning fifty years, for many people Nick Hedges will forever be associated with the photographs he took for Shelter as a recent graduate in the late 60s and early 70s. Starting out in Birmingham and moving on to other UK cities including Glasgow, Bradford and London, his camera recorded horrific housing conditions and families at the end of their tether, forming the central part of a hugely effective campaign. When talking about Janet Mendelsohn's images of Balsall Heath I had got into the habit of contrasting their world-view with portraits taken in the same neighbourhood by Hedges; the one full of warmth and cheery resilience, the other a realm of hopeless victims pinned down by damp and vermin. But of course those Shelter images had a particular job to do. When I went to meet Nick Hedges at home in Shrewsbury and had a chance to dig through the work he did while studying in Birmingham between 1966 and 1968, I discovered far more light and shade.
A grammar-school boy from Bromsgrove, Hedges credits his own political awakening to the influence of civil rights and Vietnam, as well as to an aunt who took him on CND marches as a kid. "You gradually become radicalised without knowing it - it's just a natural suit to wear." While his peers were learning to play guitar he discovered a love of photography, and following a foundation year he got a place at Birmingham College of Art. After suburban Worcestershire the buzz and cultural mix of Handsworth "felt like liberation", and one of his first college projects was recording a jazz gig in the Cross Guns pub around the corner from his flat. Working with a Leica Rangefinder to minimise noise and make the most of available light, he settled on a low-key approach that has served him well ever since. "What I always try and do is enter into an agreement with the people that I'm photographing: 'This is what I'm doing, this is why, would you mind?' So they know I'm taking photographs, but they forget about it - I just become insignificant."
The number eight inner circle bus route became an essential tool for Hedges on his voyage of discovery, documenting a huge range of subjects across the city. The early part of 1966 was spent following Labour's Smethwick candidate Andrew Faulds in his ultimately successful campaign to unseat notorious Conservative MP Peter Griffiths, while elsewhere in the negatives you can find Blues matches, snooker halls, Guy Fawkes bonfires and snowball fights. A handful of street shots were used by Oxford University Press for Rex and Moore's landmark sociology work Race Community and Conflict: A Study of Sparkbrook, and then towards the end of his second year Hedges had the rug pulled out from under him. The principal announced that the college would be unable to support his photojournalistic aspirations in the final year, and that there was no point in him continuing his studies. "I was absolutely dumbfounded."
An unhappy period followed working as a studio assistant in London and a 'chain boy' on the new M5 motorway, before a change of leadership at the college opened up a route for him to return to Birmingham and complete the final year of his diploma. In the autumn of 1967 Hedges began to work his way steadily through a series of projects and assignments - "I was quite determined to make good use of my time having been kicked out." These included a study of the Newtown Palace, a dilapidated picturehouse that had begun to screen South Asian movies, and in May 1968 a record of a tense rally held in Victoria Square shortly after Enoch Powell's speech at the Midland Hotel. The combustible atmosphere was also affecting the college itself, and the following month a group of students inspired by the example of Hornsey College of Art and les événements in Paris decided to occupy the union building. "They'd had enough of the Vietnam War, and they'd had enough of being treated like children by college management."
This presented Hedges with a dilemma, as he was on a deadline to complete a large commission for the Birmingham Housing Trust. "So at night I would sleep at the student union - I actually met a girlfriend, that was a bonus - and in the daytime I was out photographing the city." The resulting images take us on a tour of the inner ring's housing crisis, documenting the bleak circumstances which families had to contend with in these condemned neighbourhoods along with moments of humour and intimacy. Already the photographer was beginning to wonder whether charity was a salve to liberal consciences which was stopping more fundamental change from happening. "I put this to David Mumford, who chaired the housing trust. He said 'Look Nick, last week I had a married couple with four children. They turned up on the doorstep about 4:30 on a Thursday afternoon. They'd got nowhere to live. What should I do? Shall I say I can't help you today, but if you come back in two years the revolution may have happened?'"
In August the photographs were exhibited as two-metre prints at the Birmingham Housing Trust's offices. On a visit to the trust Shelter director Des Wilson happened to see the show, and shortly afterwards he rang Hedges to ask if he'd like to join the charity in London as their in-house photographer. The role took him all over the country, although one of his first assignments was back in Balsall Heath in early 1969. The resulting images of the Milne family on Vincent Crescent helped feed into a media furore about living conditions on the street, with a 1970 public housing report detailing the extent of damp and infestation and concluding: "Vincent Crescent is dead; the houses should be buried without further ceremony or delay. There will be few mourners." The street was demolished shortly afterwards.
When asked by the Guardian in 2009 to pick his favourite shot Nick Hedges went back to an image of the double-bass player at the Cross Guns, and it's clear that this period helped to shape everything he has done since. "I think I was extremely lucky to be in the city at the point at which so much was changing... If I'd been there a few years earlier, it would have been locked into a post-war freezer where nothing had happened yet. If I'd been there ten years later, the old inner core of the city would've vanished. I also feel very grateful for my experience in meeting so many different communities. It made me a much more rounded human."
This is a chapter from the Flatpack publication This Way to the Revolution. An exhibition of Nick Hedges’ photographs is on display at the Birmingham Back to Backs until the end of September. Dan Watts’ documentary on Nick is showing at Northern Eye photography festival on 16 October.
