New Town, Old School: Photographing Northstowe before the town became itself

Northstowe is the largest new town being built in the UK since Milton Keynes. It has been my home for the last eight years.

It is being developed on the former RAF Oakington airfield, between Cambridge and the Fen edge. As it approaches the tenth anniversary of the first residents arriving, it is still very much a town in the process of becoming a town. Streets, houses and public spaces are appearing, but there are large areas where the previous landscape remains visible. Old boundaries cut across new developments. Empty spaces sit alongside finished houses. Construction sites give way to fields, and military remnants sit beside the infrastructure of a new community.

We tend to think of towns as finished things. You arrive somewhere and it is simply there. Streets have names, buildings have histories, people have routines, groups are established and the landscape has acquired a familiar appearance.

Northstowe hasn’t reached that point yet.

As an early resident and amateur photographer, I started photographing it because I was fascinated by the process happening around me. I’m not photographing new houses simply as architectural objects. What interests me is everything around them: the materials waiting to be used, the spaces waiting to acquire a purpose, the evidence of things that have happened during the building process, the interim states and temporary structures that may disappear as quickly as they arrived.

It is a landscape of the not quite yet.

And perhaps inevitably, a landscape of the already gone.

I’m photographing it with a camera and process that belong, in photographic terms at least, to another age.

New town, old camera

I decided to work with my Pentax ME Super, limiting myself to a 50mm lens, shooting black and white film and developing it by hand in Caffenol.

Why?

One of my modern digital cameras could make perfect sense for this project. I could walk around and photograph everything as pixel perfect high resolution images, checking them immediately and returning whenever something changed.

But that isn’t the point. Using the Pentax, a small, straightforward 35mm SLR from an earlier generation, forces me to slow down and consider what is in front of the lens. For me, it is a camera for looking.

I’m not trying to make sweeping architectural photographs or dramatic aerial views of the development. I’m interested in what is at eye level. The camera and 50mm lens combination keeps me at human scale.

And then there’s film.. For the most part I’m using Fomapan. Not a particularly expensive or exotic film. I like that.

But the other part of the process is what happens after I’ve taken the photographs: I develop the film in Caffenol: coffee, washing soda and vitamin C.

It’s an almost absurdly analogue process for photographing a town designed to represent the future.

Why Caffenol?

I didn’t choose Caffenol because I thought it would somehow make the photographs more “vintage”.

If anything, the attraction is the uncertainty. Caffenol isn’t as predictable as simply pouring a commercial developer into a tank and following the instructions. The results have their own character, and there are inevitably small variations with each roll developed.

That seems fitting for Northstowe.

The town itself is a work in progress. A view that exists today may disappear behind a new building in a few months.

The negatives have their own imperfections and variations too. The photographic process becomes part of the project rather than simply a way of recording it

Looking slowly

There’s also something deliberately slow about the process.I have an SLR and a roll of film.Thirty-six opportunities at a time.That limitation changes the way I look.

I walk.

I stop.

I look again.

Sometimes I take the photograph.

Sometimes I don’t.

Then I go home and develop the film with ingredients that are more likely to be found in a kitchen than a darkroom.

By the time I scan the negatives, the landscape may already have changed.

I like that.

It creates a separation between making the photograph and seeing the photograph. It also means that I’m not constantly trying to perfect the image while I’m standing in front of the subject.

The photograph has already happened. All I can do is wait and see what I’ve got.

A town becoming history

There is a slightly paradoxical aspect to photographing somewhere new. At first, it feels as though you’re photographing the future. But the moment you press the shutter, you’re also photographing the past.

That is particularly noticeable at Northstowe.

A photograph made today might show a road that won’t look the same next year. A pile of pipes will be buried. A pile of bricks will become a home. A building compound will become a park, a school or a community centre.

Although, as I write this, we’re still waiting for a shop!

The photograph freezes a moment in a process that doesn’t stop. That is what has gradually become the main interest of the project for me. I’m less interested in producing a comprehensive record of Northstowe than in collecting fragments and reflections on the journey.

Others will take perfect digital images showing the finished town. What I want to preserve are some of the things that happen before that.

The awkwardness.

The gaps.

The leftovers.

The temporary arrangements.

The places where the old landscape hasn’t quite given way to the new one.

And so it has become not simply a documentary exercise, but also a meditation on the tensions, challenges and promise of building a new community over time.

The not quite yet

The pipes are a good example of what draws me to the project.

They are infrastructure waiting to become infrastructure. At some point these pipes will disappear beneath the ground, carrying water, services or drainage. Once the town is complete, most people will walk over them without ever knowing they are there.

For now, though, they are visible. They are part of the between.

A new town also produces strange contradictions. A park may look finished, with grass, benches and newly planted trees, but a fence can still say KEEP OUT.

The landscape has been designed for people, but people aren’t quite allowed to use it yet. The invitation to play is there, but so is the prohibition.

That tension between invitation and exclusion occurs repeatedly in Northstowe. The town is being made for future residents, but for much of its construction those future residents are effectively looking at it from the outside.

There is also something strangely human about looking at a collection of foundations. At this stage they are simply concrete, piles of bricks and timber. But each one represents a future home. And each future home represents something much less abstract: people, families, arguments, dinners, birthdays, children growing up, dogs, gardens, neighbours – lives yet to be lived.

None of that is visible in the photograph.

But it’s there in the potential of the foundations.

This is perhaps what makes photographing a new town different from photographing an established one. In an older town, you can look at a house and imagine the history contained within it. Here, you can sometimes only imagine the history that hasn’t happened yet. The buildings and streets are the raw ingredients of future lives.

Not everything in the landscape is about the future. Some things are evidence of what has already happened. A COVID-19 “Keep your distance” sign, left among construction barriers and materials, is a small reminder that the town hasn’t been built in isolation from the wider world. The sign was temporary. The circumstances were temporary. But they have now become part of Northstowe’s history.

It is another example of the way the past accumulates even while the town is still being built.

And sometimes even the future becomes history faster than expected.

The House by Urban Splash sales centre was intended to promote a different approach to housebuilding, based around modular construction. It was a very contemporary idea for a very contemporary new town. But the company subsequently went into administration, and the sales centre became another temporary object in the landscape.

I find this particularly interesting. Something designed to represent the future became part of the past while the town around it was still being built.

Old school

The “old school” in the title isn’t meant simply as a reference to film photography. It’s about the relationship between the way the town is being created and the way I’m choosing to photograph it.

Northstowe is planned, engineered and designed for the future.

I’m walking around it with a 35mm SLR.

The town is being built with modern machinery, computer modelling and contemporary construction techniques.

I’m developing my photographs in coffee.

That contrast makes me smile, but I also think it says something more serious about photography.

New technology doesn’t necessarily make us better observers.

Sometimes removing technology from the process makes us pay more attention.

The Pentax doesn’t show me an instant image.The film doesn’t give me unlimited exposures. Caffenol doesn’t give me perfectly repeatable results.

All of those limitations force me to slow down and reflect.

Before the town became itself

Many of the images will simply become records of things that  changed or disappeared. Perhaps others will acquire meaning because they show something that became important along the way.

That’s one of the reasons I want to continue making the photographs.

This isn’t a project with a neat ending. I keep coming back to it in fits and starts. As long as Northstowe is changing, the project can continue. It’s a slow, slightly unpredictable process. But so is creating a new community.

Eventually the finished town will become ordinary. People will stop noticing that it is new. The temporary landscape will vanish, and the community will mature.

And that’s the point at which these photographs will become something else.

They will no longer be photographs of a town being built.

They will be photographs of what was there before the town became itself.

New Town, Old School is an ongoing personal photographic project by Peter Cope.
More of the project can be seen on his website here

Share this post: