Patrick Ward — Manplan Britain in the Late 1960s Series 2 books
Patrick Ward — Manplan Britain in the Late 1960s Series 2 books
36 pages
printed in England
staple bound
14cm x 20cm
second print
In 1969 the Architectural Review invited guest editor Tim Rock to produce a few issues of the magazine. His brief was to take a hard look at the state of Britain, which must have come as a rude awakening for the readers of this conservative journal. I was lucky to receive the opening assignment for this ambitious project and spent the following six weeks recording the frustrations surrounding life, work and leisure in the Britain of the late 1960s.
The result was a photo essay called “Manplan” which ran for 75 pages in the magazine and from which these images are drawn. The project ran for several more issues, with other editorial photographers exploring more specific subjects for the project. However, I think it’s fair to surmise that the magazine, its readers, and its advertisers were relieved to return to the safer territory of architectural photography, with its correct verticals and its political correctness too!
Still, some 45 years later the sense of excitement at telling a story that needed to be told lingers on. At a time when I was also working regularly for the Sunday Times Magazine it does seem ironic that it was a modest magazine, usually concerned with buildings, that gave me the freedom to shoot one of the most significant sets of pictures in my career.
Book two continues the 1969 shoot made for The Architectural Review, which was a brave attempt by that magazine to show the frustrations of living in Britain at that time.
However, this essay also includes, and opens with, a set of pictures shot later the same year for the housing charity, Shelter. Had I shot these pictures earlier they would almost certainly have been included in the original Manplan essay. These images were made during a fleeting visit to The Gorbals, then a grim and notorious slum area in Glasgow. Being there on behalf of Shelter, which was struggling to improve the tragic living conditions, gave me a level of access, and safety, which I would not otherwise have been granted.
Back then photographers often gave their time freely to charities and I was pleased that Shelter got a poster to promote their work out of my visit. Looking at these pictures now I realize that I would have been 32 when I made the portrait of the mother and her three infants, and I suspect that she, so care-worn and defeated, was probably younger than I. Her children would now be in their fifties and the Gorbals is fortunately long gone. I wonder if it still haunts them.
Patrick Ward
