Working lives: photographs by John Darwell and from the Stockport Museum Archive

An exploration of the many clothing industries working in and around Manchester, England. The images concentrate on the traditional and endangered areas of hatting, clog making and leather tanneries, capturing not only the startling 'Dickensian' environments but also the people who spend their working lives using processes that have essentially remained unaltered for the last one hundred years. Since this work was completed the majority of the locations visited have subsequently closed down.