This exhibition brings together more than fifty years of documentary photography from Tyneside and East London. Under Development: What Happens When Cities Change? draws on the AmberSide Collection and Four Corners Archive to trace the human consequences of decisions about housing, planning and who gets to shape the places we live. 

In 2026, Newcastle and the London borough of Tower Hamlets are home to almost the same number of people: around 330,000 each. They sit within two much wider urban histories, Tyneside in the North East and East London, nearly 300 miles apart but shaped by some strikingly similar forces.

Both grew through river trade and industry. Both became home to generations of people arriving for work and building communities around it. Both saw large areas of working-class housing cleared and rebuilt. Both were hit hard by the loss of industries that had shaped them. And both were later subject to ambitious programmes of regeneration intended to give former industrial places a new future.

Within this history, two photographic organisations were taking shape. The Amber Film & Photography Collective moved to Tyneside in 1969 and opened Side Gallery, a dedicated space for documentary film and photography on Newcastle’s Quayside, in 1977. Four Corners was founded in Bethnal Green in 1973, while the nearby Half Moon Photography Workshop, later called Camerawork, was developing its own radical approach to photography and publishing.

These organisations did not begin as institutions looking back on local history. They were making photographs and films while the cities, industries and lives around them were changing. They were there as streets disappeared, housing changed, communities settled and organised, and arguments about the future of these places were still being fought.

Today, those issues are far from finished. Britain is once again facing an acute housing crisis, and we are once again being asked to imagine how places might be rebuilt, expanded and made better.

Under Development brings the AmberSide Collection and Four Corners Archive together to ask what happens when housing ambitions become real places to live. Through photographs made across more than fifty years, it looks at what changed, what was gained, what was lost, what people fought for and what happened next.

With Thanks To The Artists, Collections and Estates:

Amber Film & Photography Collective, Mayar Akash, Katalin Arkell, Peter Arkell, Julie Begum, Bengali Photo Archive, Diane Bush, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mick Catmull, Steve Conlan, John Davies, Dorman Long Collection, T.J. Ermel, Jimmy Forsyth, Martine Franck, Peter Fryer, Lloyd Gee, Richard Grassick, Nick Hedges, David Hoffman, Isabela Jedrzejczyk, Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Anthony Lamb, Lambton Visual Aids, Tom Learmonth, Magnum, Ron McCormick, Tanbir Mirza-Baeg, Newcastle City Library, NLA, North East Museums, Keith Pattison, Rehana Rahman, Ray Rising, Abu Sahid, Andrew Scott, Derek Smith, Graham Smith, T. Dan Smith Collection, Paul Trevor, Ansar Ahmed Ullah, Raju Vaidyanathan, Bev Zalcock, Amena Zaman.

About Four Corners

We are a creative centre for film and photography, based in east London for 50 years. We draw on our history of radical, socially-engaged approaches, exploring often hidden and marginalised stories through exhibitions, films and community-led programmes. 

Four Corners Archive comprises the early work of Four Corners and its neighbour the Half Moon Photography Workshop, which is best known for its radical photography magazine Camerawork.