The Kings Cross of these paintings has disappeared. The gasometer cages, walls, bridges, pipes, gasworks have gone. The glamour of dereliction is fading as the city begins a new cycle of decay.

Landscape painting in the Western tradition has been largely about possession and the projection of sensibility onto the blank, obdurate stuff of the world.

I like the folly and grandeur of this process. Maybe that’s why these paintings have a crepuscular feel. The frozen, twilit moment of the liminal: the discarded landscape’s promise of renewal.

It’s hardly a coincidence that nuclear power plants are situated in the most stunning settings. They are emblems of our divided relationship to landscape. We treat the ‘countryside' as benign, denatured, picturesque. This is a distant folk memory of the Greenwood – an idyll of commonwealth and misrule.

But there are other landscapes: of motorway slip roads and verges, of distribution warehouses, call centres, fly tips and the surreal urban hinterland where the mythologies of town and country lap and mingle.

Nuclear plants transcend both realms – the utilitarian and the ideal, the sentimental and the contemptuous. Their decommissioned hulks are the triumph of nemesis over hubris as they are slowly re-accommodated by the landscape they were built to affront.



Born: Birkenhead, Merseyside, 1951

Art education:
Sir John Cass School of Art, 1976-77
Chelsea College of Art & Design, 1977-1979