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community. Instead, he wanted to find
a new way of looking at the people and
countryside of the north-east. As he says
in the introduction, this project was to be
part record and part personal exploration.C
oal towns were often created
around existing villages and
previously uninhabited rural
areas. New coal mining villages
and communities sprang up, bringing large
numbers of people into remote rural
locations. Agriculture and a living off
the land were not the prime reason for
the existence of these highly populated
communities. A row of terraced houses,
typical of countless streets in a city, would
spring up in the middle of a field bringing
the men, women and children who lived
there, and whose livelihoods derived from
the pits, into a new experience and
contact with nature.
The relationship between people and
nature is the central theme of Northern
Exposures. Steele-Perkins wanted to make›