"Newcastle was my home town only in the sense that it was the city my family went to for special shopping or entertainment from our home in Dipton, County Durham. I would be exploring the city as much as photographing it. In 1966 it was a black city, most of its buildings coated with a skin of soot, and it would be very easy to fall into the trap of stereotyping it as dark and grimy. I hoped to escape this by venturing into the Scotswood Road area, where the city was being transformed from nineteenth-century terraces to twentieth-century high rise. What I caught was a city on the cusp of change: while blocks were going up in the West End the quayside was crowded with shipping and coal was still being loaded at the Dunston Staiths."