Industry/Occidental

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This is a double-header book that offers two photographic explorations of the legacy of industry in the British landscape.

Read from one end, Industry takes as its starting point the paranoia of some early observers of the Industrial Revolution: the fear that industry was a fire-breathing monstrosity consuming the picturesque British countryside and transforming it into a smoke-wreathed netherworld peopled by ragged, half-starved workers. Fast forward two hundred years or so to the present day and we are confronted by a very different experience of industry in the landscape. The main battles – between industry and nature, capital and labour, urban and rural – feel largely played out, reduced to minor skirmishes. Industry itself is a strangely anonymous presence that we take for granted in our lived environment; a blandscape, if you will.

Flip the book over and enter the world of Occidental: an exploration of the ruins of a lost industrial civilisation in the marshy jungle of the Thames estuary. An American oil company built this mysterious folly, frittering away £65 million in 1970s prices for the development of a refinery that never processed a drop of petrochemicals.

Industry/Occidental

Adam Clitheroe

136 pages, 113 colour and black-and-white images, two short essays.

Italian papers, section sewn binding, 213mm x 258mm.

ISBN 978-1-7384000-1-0

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