The first career retrospective of Ian Beesley, who was born in Bradford and has a vast archive made over a working life of more than four decades in the north of England.

He first found work at Esholt sewage works, where colleagues urged him to find a passion and get an education; with their help he found the camera. He went to Bradford College of Art, then to Bournemouth and Poole, and on graduating won the Kodak scholarship for social documentation. Thus began a lifelong study of the industrial and cultural heritage of the north. His early output was made walking the streets, catching a society now extinct: children playing outside, women talking between tightly terraced houses, grafters working at full pelt inside vast Victorian factories. He soon began recording the brutal closure of core heavy industries such as mining and iron and steel. The nobility of labour, and the horror of having one's skills forcibly rendered obsolete, run through the whole of it.