Steve’s focus on life in the Eighties

APHOTOGRAPHER captured rare photographs of how things used to be in Merseyside decades ago.

Steve Conlan, now 61, got into photography as a teenager while undergoing an arts foundation course.

In later years, Steve studied graphics at a college in Hull and said he was “lucky” to come across the people and places that encouraged him to get into photography.

And by the late 1980s, Steve began photographing the changing community around Liverpool’s dockland, as well as the seaside resort he loved to visit as a child.

Taken over a series of days 37 years ago, the photographs have been rediscovered after being unseen for years.

Steve was commissioned to photograph local businesses and people across Southport by Sefton Council. At the time, he also ran photography workshops for young people in the area, with their combined work, under the Sefton Documentary Project, being exhibited in The Atkinson in Southport.

Steve said: “I have memories from my childhood, we used to go to Southport during the summer but at the end of the holidays we would always go to the fair and spend money that my mum and dad never had. Going back, it was great.

“Southport has this wonderful history, the Victorian period from when it was built and the intricacies of Lord Street were still there. Again, it’s the thing of having a camera and asking people can we do something.

“When you go and take photographs of something, they almost always say yes and when they do, you have something great to show. It was that in Southport, it was going around and seeing different things.”

Steve said: “In the cafe, you can see the old couple and the serving hatch with the woman with the uniform on. It was the old black uniform with the white pinny. It’s capturing that moment when you think this isn’t going to last a long time, people won’t be wearing these uniforms.

“Some of the photos inside the pubs were taken on days of the Orange Lodge marches, so they were quite wild. Other photos show people having fun, that’s what I remember Southport for from being a kid.”

More images of Steve’s from this time, as well as photographs of Liverpool docklands in 1988 and the Poll Tax demonstration march in London in 1990, are now featured in a series of Cafe Royal Books.

With their first title published in 2005, Cafe Royal Books was the idea of Craig Atkinson, who wanted to create a way to make artwork accessible to a wider audience.

A family-run publisher, in 2022, Cafe Royal Books received the Royal Photographic Society Award for Photographic Publishing. Many works from Merseyside photographers have been featured through the years.

Steve said: “At the time when you photograph, you don’t think these will be interesting in 40 years - you just think this is the now, this is what’s in front of me. Looking back on them now, they’ve become almost a very different thing.

“There were good times and there were bad times and you’ve got to get it all, you’ve got to photograph it all.

“I just hope people take it the way it was intended. I was always positive about photographs and I always wanted to people to see Liverpool people as good people, because we are.

“For me to be a working class lad going and photographing working class people and saying look we’re alright there’s nothing wrong with us

– that’s what I always wanted to do and spent many years trying to do and hopefully I did.”

Steve Conlan’s three books - Southport, Liverpool, Poll Tax - are now available to purchase via Cafe Royal Books. To see more of Steve’s work, you can visit his website.