Mick Hartley

The new Centre for British Photography opens this week in Jermyn Street, Soho. Its inaugural exhibition looks back to the last century:

The exhibition, The English at Home, takes its name from a seminal book published in the 1930s by Bill Brandt, one of the first photographers to critique the nation’s class system by taking the viewer into the homes and lives of working people, producing tender, intimate yet at times disturbing portraits. On display is a documentary lineage that begins with Brandt and includes acclaimed shoots commissioned by The Sunday Times: John Bulmer’s 1965 project on degradation and industrial decline in the north; and Colin Jones’s series shot at a hostel for young black people in north London between 1973 and 1976.

Children play in a dilapidated street amid the bleak industrial landscape of Benwell, Newcastle. Colin Jones, 1963

Residents at a hostel in north London, captured in a series exposing the housing problems faced by young black people. Colin Jones, 1976

A mother takes her baby for a stroll past a Union Jack mural on a terraced street in Liverpool. John Bulmer, 1965

An elderly woman shelters on the beach at Whitley Bay. Marketa Luskacova, 1978

Children bed down for the night in cramped conditions at a home in West Ham, London. Bill Brandt, 1937

The world is full of possibilities for this budding TV viewer. David Moore, 1988

A young child looks disconsolate despite the prize of a biscuit. Kurt Hutton, 1945

On June Street in Salford, Greater Manchester. Daniel Meadows and Martin Parr in 1973

I featured those June Street Salford photos by Daniel Meadows and Martin Parr a while back.