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Byker is an intimate portrait of a community faced with redevelopment and a celebration of the richness of its culture, evoking an entire era in British working-class life. Building on the seminal photography project from Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, which documented the community of terraced streets in Newcastle’s East End, demolished to make way for Ralph Erskine-designed Byker Wall Estate in the 1970s.
Konttinen, a founder member of the Amber collective moved to Byker when the group came to North East of England in 1969. She lived there until 1976, when her own flat was demolished:
"One way or another I had grown to be part of my street, and the community. It had been my first own home, and a real home for me. As my neighbour Nancy points out proudly: "When she first come into our street, she couldn't tell 'hello' from 'tarra', and now she speaks FINNISH with a Geordie accent."
The project Byker was shown widely throughout the UK and internationally, in the early 1980s it was toured in China, along with the work of Ashington's Pitmen Painters, as the first British exhibition in the country after the Cultural Revolution.
Konttinen also returned to document the Byker Wall Estate in the 2000s.
Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen is a Finnish-born documentary photographer who has chronicled working-class life in North East England since the late 1960s.
A co-founder of the Amber Film and Photography Collective, her acclaimed work, including Byker and Step by Step, offer significant portrayals of the lives of everyday people in the North East. In 2011 her photography was inscribed onto the UNESCO Memory of the World Register as of national significance to the UK due to her embedded practice and historically vital portrayals of local communities. In 2025 Konttinen was awarded an MBE in the 2025 New Year’s Honours list for her services to photography.
