In Focus: Every Breath They Take

In December 1987 a government inspector refused planning permission for a new power station and its 55-metre chimney at Monkton cokeworks. It was a rare moment when official process aligned, briefly, with the people who lived in the shadow of the plant. That refusal has become a marker: a reminder of what residents had been saying for decades, and of the labour of those who kept pushing when no one in power seemed to listen.

Keith Pattison’s series Every Breath They Take sits inside this history. Made in the late 1980s, it follows the Hebburn Residents’ Action Group as they organised against the pollution that shaped daily life on two estates beside the cokeworks. The visible smoke and the invisible harm. The blackened windowsills, the grit on kitchen tables, the noise, the stench, the breathlessness. The everyday work of watching the sky to see what the ovens were doing. And the quieter work of trying to keep a sense of normal life going.

Pattison’s photographs engaging with local residents and action groups, show how community protection becomes a kind of unpaid, unavoidable labour: the sort usually carried by women, and rarely acknowledged outside the neighbourhood itself.

The long-form exhibition text captures the texture of this period. Residents spoke plainly because there was no point being polite any more. One woman said, “I’ve never had one hour’s health. I used to say to my husband, if you don’t get me out of here they’re going to carry me out in a box.” (Every Breath They Take, Exhibition Text). Another resident described the impossible housekeeping: “For 52 weeks a year it’s a constant battle to keep abreast of the filth.” Others talked about ruined food and constant dusting, the way dirt seeped into every corner of the home.

The community’s most visible organiser, Jennie Shearan, appears often in Pattison’s work. The text describes her watching the flare stack through the night: “She’d been up all night, watching the dragon… from the upstairs of her neat corner house in Melrose Avenue, you can see the dragon she’s been battling with since 1963.” (Every Breath They Take, Exhibition Text). That detail of where she was standing while she kept watch says a lot: an ordinary home, a quiet street, a woman who should not have had to spend her life surveying an industrial flame to see if it would threaten the people around her.

Shearan’s persistence was practical as well as political. The text recounts how, while raising a petition, she realised the scale of the health crisis: “I went up Hexham Avenue – people with masks and oxygen in so many houses. They were asking if they could sign the petition twice, they felt so strongly.” (Every Breath They Take, Exhibition Text). These normal lives are the settings where much of the real activism happened.

What gives the series its force is how it balances these intimate scenes against the scale of the plant itself. Pattison never lets the viewer forget the size of the machinery or the proximity of the chimneys. The cokeworks sits behind houses, above gardens, beyond washing lines. It turns the background into the problem. And it shows the distance between political promises and the day-to-day lives of the people who had to live with the consequences. As the exhibition text puts it: “In the cradle of democracy, a lot of hopes are stillborn.” (Every Breath They Take, Exhibition Text).

This December we return to the moment when residents first won the 1987 refusal on the proposed power station and chimney. Their victory was short-lived, dragged back into legal dispute, but it mattered. It showed what collective pressure could achieve, even against a backdrop of decades of inaction. Pattison’s photographs preserve what follows. They show a community holding the line when no one else would.

Every Breath They Take is not just a record of environmental protest. It is a portrait of people doing what they can with the tools they have. It is a reminder that care can be political. And it is evidence that the fight for clean air in Britain did not begin in the age of climate policy but in places like Hebburn, where residents met at kitchen tables and refused to be dismissed.