The Plough and the Pick.

The Plough and the Pick (2024), published as a book and available here, is a project about people and place within the Dearne Valley in South Yorkshire. It’s about social geographies and the enduring impacts of coal mining, and about agriculture within this peri-urban, post industrial space.

Using verbatim interview text alongside documentary photography, the work explores how the seemingly separate worlds of the plough and the pick are in fact intertwined within families and across this altered landscape, and offers working people’s reflections on past, present and future as pause for thought for all of us in a rapidly changing world.

“The pit heap out that way is Mitchell’s Main, and the one to the left we farm is Darfield Main pit heap, and from Darfield Colliery to the pit heap there used to be an overhead gantry with buckets on it and when it was working the kids used to jump in and ride on it.

Then they got rid of that and used big machinery to transport the spoil across the road”