Selected Trash from the Ruins of Society is the result of a ten-year quest: a cumulative photographic, literary and psychogeographical critique of twenty-first-century British society, developed most intensively through Sheffield and its surrounding districts but extending at points to London, Stratford, Southampton and elsewhere. Across its volumes, the project gathers what official culture overlooks, manages, demolishes, prettifies or declares valueless: shuttered shops, public lavatories, pubs, station platforms, domestic objects, fences, allotments, cemeteries, signs, bodily traces, fragments of advertising, scraps of counterculture, religious literature, damaged buildings and transient arrangements of light. The title’s “trash” is thus both material and conceptual, while its “ruins” include not only post-industrial brickwork but eroded public provision, working-class memory, political confidence, local commerce, countercultural possibility, ecological continuity and personal certainty. Selection is an argumentative act of attention: a refusal of the hierarchies by which one object becomes heritage, another an investment opportunity and a third mere rubbish.
The project presents itself as an archive of photographs and accompanying texts, yet its governing concern is the unstable act of looking. An image may begin in chance, habit, boredom, compulsion, bodily limitation or the sudden recognition that something familiar has become strange. The camera fixes a surface, but the prose immediately loosens it. Description becomes association; association becomes social criticism, local history, memoir, fantasy, occult speculation or comic retraction. A reflection becomes a portal, a shadow a face, a suburban tree a world tree, a traffic island a celestial compass, a gap between houses a charged threshold. The narrator knows that such meanings are made rather than simply found, but pursues them seriously enough to test how perception turns into interpretation and how interpretation, confidently framed, can masquerade as fact. Photographs are therefore evidence, prompts and traps at once: they prove that a surface existed, while failing to preserve the weather, atmosphere, bodily effort, remembered music or private history that made it significant.
This method produces a deliberately discontinuous form. Place names, remembered conversations, invented art-historical notices, documentary descriptions, corporate statements, found slogans, occult archives, overheard speech, literary quotations and political digressions collide without being forced into conventional narrative. The apparent miscellany is not an absence of structure but the structure itself. Thought moves as walking moves: forward, sideways and back on itself, diverted by a sign, a wall, an irritation, a joke or a recovered memory. Recurring motifs – windows, doors, paths, circles, walls, light, fog, trees, birds, transmitters, benches, cemeteries and blocked entrances – operate as landmarks. Coherence arises through echo and recurrence rather than linear exposition, allowing the profound and ridiculous, sacred and profane, documentary and invented to remain productively entangled.
The voice that sustains this movement is observant, abrasive, learned, self-mocking and knowingly unreliable. It moves between exact description and extravagant conjecture, philosophical speculation and pub anecdote, political denunciation and comic bathos. Long sentences pursue thought in real time; abrupt fragments puncture claims with bodily fact or profanity. The narrator distrusts cultural prestige, civic publicity, respectable taste and institutional authority, yet subjects his own motives, memories and grandiosity to the same pressure. Repeated admissions – “I don’t know”, “I can’t remember”, “maybe”, “or something” – function not as evasions but as an ethic of fallibility. Factual uncertainty coexists with ethical conviction: a street name may be forgotten, but exploitation, exclusion, mystification and civic stupidity remain open to judgement. Humour attacks pretension, prevents reverence from settling around the narrator’s own practices and maintains agency against illness, mortality and decline.
Across all the volumes, Sheffield is encountered at street level rather than from the viewpoint of tourism or regeneration publicity. Alleyways, back roads, former toilets, industrial walls, charity shops, pubs, social clubs, student developments and neglected civic spaces reveal the gap between the city as marketed and the city as lived. Neoliberalism appears not as an abstract doctrine but as a texture laid over ordinary life: public facilities become restaurants or speculative developments; artisan housing becomes a lifestyle asset; university expansion overwrites working-class districts; charities compete for visibility; counterculture is absorbed into markets of style; local history is cleaned, branded or demolished. Regeneration often amounts to a redistribution of visibility and value, polishing some structures while abandoning others or preserving hardship as picturesque evidence. The work resists nostalgia, however, recognising that the past also contained hierarchy, vanity and exploitation. Its question is not how to restore an untouched community, but who controls access, naming, memory and the language through which loss is recast as improvement.
Class is fundamental to this struggle over value. Luxury labels, glossy listings, apartment towers, branded trainers and pseudo-mansions recur as symptoms of a culture in which price attempts to replace judgement and identity becomes a purchasable surface. Consumer goods promise distinction; redevelopment promises prosperity; religious tracts promise salvation. Each asks the subject to experience ordinary streets, clothing and selfhood as insufficient. Against this, the collection grants sustained attention to what is too minor, awkward or unruly for official accounts. Yet the gaze is not innocent. The camera selects, intrudes and appropriates; passers-by and neighbourhoods can be recruited into arguments they did not choose. Rather than claiming moral purity, the writing exposes the photographer’s appetite, opportunism, prejudice and capacity for projection, leaving the reader to judge where observation becomes stereotype, sympathy becomes possession or mockery creates another form of contempt.
Spirituality, occultism and countercultural experiment form a parallel field of inquiry. Buddhism, evangelical Christianity, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth, invented magical orders and private ritual sites appear as competing technologies of meaning. The collection remains responsive to illumination, symbolic correspondence and numinous experience while distrusting doctrine, hierarchy, manipulation and authorised interpreters. An accidental cross, a hollow tree, a ritual offering or a charged landscape may be revelation, chance arrangement, imaginative projection or all three. The text refuses a final choice. Private naming and local myth – the Mound ov Krekja, the Crookes Ash, the Hollow Tree, ghost fields, gateways and imagined temples – restore density to places flattened by administrative language, while parodying the mechanisms by which national myths, religious systems and property claims become accepted as truth. Experience remains alive when enacted; it becomes suspect when institutionalised into bureaucracy, status or salesmanship.
Walking gives the later volumes their clearest narrative architecture and makes the body impossible to ignore. Sheffield’s hills are measured through breath, fatigue, gradients, pauses and recovery. Serious illness, cancer treatment, chronic lung problems and the narrowed range imposed by the pandemic transform ordinary mobility into an achievement and enforced slowness into a condition of noticing. Place becomes an external memory system in which former selves, vanished buildings, old publications, music, hospital corridors, pubs and political projects survive as partial traces. Memory behaves less like an archive than a weather system, obscuring and illuminating by turns; forgetting is as important as recollection, and the refusal to verify every date or name protects speculative freedom from the bureaucratic deadness of fact gathering. Domestic objects – the old knife, missing vase, useless repair part or temporary radiator – extend this counter-archive indoors, addressing issues of family history and failed utility.
Within this shared method, the volumes differ in emphasis. The earliest volume ranges most widely and establishes the project’s central unstable documentary form: Sheffield is joined by London, Southampton and other locations, while satire, spiritual autobiography, art-world parody and social wreckage remain in vigorous collision. Volume 2 sharpens the analysis of the image as delayed recognition and develops thresholds, windows, circles, blocked paths and managed appearances as figures for ownership, surveillance and social sorting; it also foregrounds the ethics of photographing others. Volume 3 concentrates on neoliberal commodification, post-industrial travel and the anti-guidebook impulse, binding Sheffield, Stratford and routes through London to illness, the frustrations attendant on waiting and the seductions of dereliction.
Volume 4 narrows geographically to Crookes, the Bole Hills, Crookes Cemetery and Clough Fields, openly embracing psychogeography while mocking its institutional versions. Pandemic confinement, bodily limitation, walls, gates, allotments and contested names make the familiar neighbourhood a map of attention and consciousness. Volume 5 deepens this local and bodily method: repeated circuits become acts of recovery and informal research, while fading public-health signs, erased facilities and post-punk or occult memories register the politics of collective amnesia. The ordinary world is increasingly re-enchanted through faces in surfaces, houses becoming lighthouses and trees becoming sites of apparition, without surrendering scepticism.
Volume 6 gives the wandering method its most explicit spatial scheme in “Old Times”, “Homeland”, “Nearland”, “Borderland” and “Farland”. Its distinctive contribution is the integration of convalescence, cancer treatment and domestic material culture with the political geography of streets, housing, religion and public services. The nearby world becomes both a survival practice and a counter-archive. Volume 7 broadens that practice into an ecological and philosophical defence of “attentive wandering”: trees, birds, insects, rough woodland, filters, sacred geometry, mental-health histories and user-led organisations extend the politics of attention beyond buildings, while meditations on mortality are expressed through contemplations of memorial benches, cemeteries and threatened forms of communal care.
Volumes 8 and 9 are darker and more retrospective. Their critique of civic “progress”, council fantasy, university expansion and student-development capitalism is especially sustained, and its cemeteries, cancer hospital and narratives of disability activism place mortality, gratitude and social commitment beside misanthropy and disillusionment. Here personalised myth-making – ritual hillocks, offerings, magical orders and remembered pilgrimages – appears as a temporary but necessary resistance to entropy. Across the later work more generally, the geographical field remains intensely local, yet the philosophical reach expands: the city becomes a set of overlapping fields of perception, the body a measure of space and time, and the act of walking a form of resistance to the economic demand that every activity justify itself through measurable outcomes.
Despite these shifts, the volumes share a persistent ethical and aesthetic tension. They rescue neglected surfaces from invisibility while questioning who may enjoy decline aesthetically and who must endure it materially. They seek revelation yet distrust authoritative explanation; condemn consumerism while acknowledging the narrator’s own complicity; value local knowledge while leaving facts unresolved; and use hostility, profanity and ridicule alongside tenderness for animals, trees, vulnerable people, practical expertise and small communal objects. Their politics arise from looking: to attend to a place is to notice who controls it, who profits from its transformation, whose language dominates its description and what lives or histories are treated as expendable.
Taken together, the nine volumes constitute neither a conventional local history nor a stable catalogue of photographs, but a long record of encounters between images and a restless intelligence. They ask what is worth noticing; who decides what counts as art, history, waste or evidence; how private memory attaches itself to public space; whether attention can become a moral practice; and how mockery might expose false value without reproducing contempt. No final system resolves these questions. Instead, the project looks, invents, retracts, remembers, walks and looks again. Its achievement lies in showing that the near at hand is never exhausted: ruins remain inhabited, trash remains eloquent, and the overlooked world continues to disturb the polished stories told about it.
Sheffield Patrol Group 