Nostalgic photos exploring English identity on the margins

Hav­ing spent a large part of his child­hood in bustling Lima, Peru’s cap­i­tal and largest city with an esti­mat­ed pop­u­la­tion of 11.2 mil­lion, Ian Howorth sees the pace of life in Eng­land dif­fer­ent­ly to most. ​“I’ve lived in cities all my life – Lima’s hec­tic, smelly and smog­gy, and then I lived in Mia­mi,” he says with a wry smile, call­ing in from Brighton where he now lives. ​“I don’t class any cities in Eng­land as a city unless it’s like Lon­don or Man­ches­ter – every­thing else is a town to me.”

With his father being born in York­shire, he would reg­u­lar­ly vis­it his rel­a­tives in the north­ern coun­ty through­out his child­hood, before even­tu­al­ly set­tling there at the age of 16. It meant that fit­ting in at school was most­ly a smooth process, despite hav­ing been raised over 6,000 miles away. 

“A lot of my friends were incred­i­bly sur­prised by how inte­grat­ed I am con­sid­er­ing I’m not Eng­lish – I knew Stig of the Dump, I’ve known Faulty Tow­ers for years” he explains. ​“So it’s even though I was on the back foot cul­tur­al­ly, it’s almost like I made a real big effort to try and fit in. But there’s also a real gen­uine love for the UK.”

His newest pho­to­book, A Coun­try Kind of Silence, is an explo­ration of life, iden­ti­ty and cul­ture in Eng­lish soci­ety – shaped by Howorth’s own migrant per­spec­tive. Filled with quin­tes­sen­tial­ly British regalia, such as a tele­phone box on the side of a coun­try lane, an inflat­able pad­dling pool, or sta­t­ic car­a­vans – the pic­tures tug on a nos­tal­gic famil­iar­i­ty for those who have grown up around cer­tain parts of the British Isles, and in spe­cif­ic times.

“I’ve been told that I’ve got a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the UK land­scape than most Eng­lish peo­ple,” Howorth says. ​“It’s prob­a­bly because I’ve seen so much of it over the last sev­en or eight years – whilst my pals were going on a kayak down the Riv­er Ouse on a per­fect summer’s day, I’m in the arse end of Mar­gate pho­tograph­ing a phone box. I think it’s maybe being up North in the 80s and 90s when I was younger and see­ing all these weird things, and it’s like a map was being built in my head of how I asso­ciate England.”

Many of the fea­tured objects ref­er­ence decades past, with the pho­tographs pro­ject­ing a sense of time­less­ness that belies the fact that they were most­ly tak­en over the past three years. With few shots fea­tur­ing peo­ple, cou­pled with Howorth’s innate sense of space and empti­ness, they are some­what haunt­ing, appear­ing to cap­ture an Eng­lish­ness that nev­er quite exist­ed in the way that it’s been remem­bered. In Howorth’s mind, that ever-mor­ph­ing sense of nation­al iden­ti­ty is key to under­stand­ing the coun­try in the first place.

“[After] Brex­it hap­pened, the ideas of sov­er­eign­ty, and ​‘what’s our place?’ [became promi­nent] – I realised that the ques­tions I was ask­ing were less to do with me and more to do with Eng­land as a whole and its chang­ing sense of iden­ti­ty.” he says. ​“Like what is it to be Eng­lish? You’re going to fish and chip shops that sells you Chi­nese food – you get cur­ry sauce on your chips.

“So there’s this sense that we have about what British­ness is, and it’s con­stant­ly chang­ing, con­stant­ly evolv­ing as time goes on,” he con­tin­ues. ​“As migrants for exam­ple, or peo­ple that have set­tled here become sec­ond gen­er­a­tion, they become British them­selves, so they change that cul­tur­al land­scape all the time.”

A Coun­try Kind of Silence by Ian Howorth is pub­lished by Setan­ta.

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