Final analysis
‘The Portway: A Line Through Time’, 2006 by Nick Lockett
One day Nick Lockett would be accompanying the late John Thaw to the Oxford location of the latest episode of Inspector Morse and the next to the set of Spitting Image, having just arrived home from photographing a documentary in Australia. This was the enviable photographic career of Nick Lockett.
Then, following a flurry of corporate mergers, Nick was made redundant. The shock was enormous and potentially financially catastrophic. But ever resourceful, he decided that this enormous volte-face could be the chance he wanted to be his own man instead of following the limiting demands of being for decades the photographic face of companies like Central, and later Carlton Television, where he was the chief photographer.
He ‘returned to school’, got a distinction on a Master’s course, and most importantly produced an exceptional body of work on The Portway – a Neolithic route that probably ran from North Africa to Ireland. And the irony is that this important ancient artery ran along the side of his house – literally under his nose – in a small Derbyshire village.
Some sections are now tarmac lanes through villages, some are way-marked bridleways that pass under dual carriageways and over railways and rivers, and some are reduced to mere grooves barely discernible as they cross open moor. But how do you photograph it?
‘It started as a landscape project using a 5x4 view camera and developed into a series of contemporary environmental posed portraits made with a DSLR where person and place have equal importance,’ Nick told me. ‘On wet days I read and researched about ancient trackways, trading routes, stone circles, cairns, henges and burial chambers, lead mining and local industry. On fine days I walked the route end-to-end many times as the work progressed. I made a sketchbook of my travels, my observations, my impressions every day on the route for nine months.’
In this image, Beverly and Andrew Rowland, who have
‘On fine days I walked the route end-toend many times as the work progressed’
farmed in the Derbyshire Dales for generations posed by the Bradstone, an ancient marker stone that guided travellers.
Nick admits he’s a history nut, and with friend and colleague, Martin Shakeshaft, he recently made a film on the UK’s oldest city-based photographers, W.W. Winter of Derby (established in 1855) that also melds the old with the new, see more at youtube/8GMUjYaI4jw.
The Portway book has become a wonderfully crafted A3 magnum opus that will be pored over in years to come by those eager to reflect on what is not just a name on various maps and a sign on a thousand streets, but a living trace left by our ancestors.
As Nick puts it, ‘The Portway is a powerful metaphor for the flow of time between birth and death, stretching back to a time before our own birth, and reaching forward beyond our own death.’