Peter Cripps Photography

Sometime during the summer of 1979 my growing interest in photography in general and social documentary photography in particular drove me to look further afield than my local city of Birmingham for subjects to make images of. I have no recollection as to why I chose Lichfield cattle market as a place to take my camera but these recently discovered images from a trawl through several hundred of my black and white negatives clearly show that’s where I ended up.

I not only have the negatives but also a (handmade) book containing a number of prints of this and my other photographic meanderings of the time. These images were all fondly developed and printed by myself in my mum’s spare bedroom and bathroom where the negatives and prints were washed using voluminous amounts of water in her bath. Luckily, her water was not metered at the time; goodness knows how much I used during those early attempts at developing and printing my own work.

Nearly 45 years after taking these images I find myself living in Lichfield so was interested to see if the market still existed. Needless to say it is long gone. The auctioneers who owned the market, the Winterton family whose name has been synonymous with auctioneering in Staffordshire since 1864, moved what was known as the Smithfield livestock market to nearby Fradley in the late 1980s. The market ran there until July 2000 when, due to falling prices, it moved again to Uttoxeter, 15 miles further North. The site in Lichfield, where the market used to be located, now has a giant Tesco supermarket on it. The last link to the market, the Smithfield pub, was finally demolished when Tesco landscaped the area around its store during, I believe, the early 1990s.

All of these images were taken with the wonderful (for me, at the time) Nikkormat FT-2 35mm SLR camera (the so called poor man’s Nikon) together with 35mm and 135mm lenses. This camera was with me for 25+ years but sadly, due to my own neglect, had to be discarded due to corrosion causing light leakage. The lenses were sold on eBay many moons ago.

I have more images, not just of this topic, which I am strangely enjoying the somewhat painstaking process of scanning (using the Plustek 8100 scanner) and editing in Lightroom and Photoshop which I’ll no doubt be uploading here in future posts.

These images certainly capture a slice of recent history. The irony of a huge enterprise like Tesco, who have been at least partially responsible for forcing suppliers to reduce costs and probably contributing to the old market closing down, being on the very site the market once occupied cannot be lost on us.

Enjoy these images and if you have any more insight into the history I refer to please comment or send me a direct message.