The photographs were brought together by Amber in the early 1980s as part of the North Tyneside Survey, a major documentary initiative that also included Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Interiors, Beaches by Konttinen and Markéta Luskačová, Luskačová’s Juvenile Jazz Bands, Urban Landscapes by Izabela Jedrzejczyk, Jungle Portraits, and work by Graham Smith. The exhibition of the Mauretania material was first shown at Swan Hunter itself, returning the photographs to the place they were taken and placing the history of the shipyard in full view of its workforce.

This project not only celebrated the achievement of the Mauretania but also acknowledged the generations of skilled workers whose expertise defined Tyneside’s shipbuilding heritage. The photographs offer a rare and detailed visual account of early twentieth-century industrial process, framed not as spectacle but as the product of human effort. As with much of Amber’s work, the exhibition gave renewed attention to local history, presenting it not as nostalgia but as living memory embedded in the landscape and in the people who shaped it.