Ian Hoskin | Hyde Park and Park Hill Flats, Sheffield, 1979-1981

Ian, “Between 1979 and 1981, I lived in a flat in the Park Hill/Hyde Park complex in Sheffield. I was a student at the Polytechnic studying for a Fine Arts Degree, specialising in Photography. The flats were excellent inside with hot water and heating, all part of the deal and heaven for students. The people were almost all really friendly, but the scale of the building and the sheer number of inhabitants just meant it was dehumanising.

“This wasn’t a project as such; I always had a camera with me, and I took photographs of what I saw on a day-to-day basis. I was only aware of the number of images I had accumulated over the three years when I started going back through my negatives, looking for images for an (unrelated) book.

“It was quite sobering to see all of the images in a line. There are very few people in them, I think to emphasise that dehumanisation. Hyde Park was a gift to photograph; every day was different, and the brutalist style of the architecture gave it an enormous presence both close at hand and at a distance.”

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