Photographing the Calder Valley: or social history at the ‘mouth of hell’

How do we write histories of small towns in the post-1945 period? Towns such as Halifax in the Calder Valley feature little in an otherwise thriving historiography of contemporary Britain. Yet for an earlier generation of social historian, most notably E. P. Thompson, who wrote The Making of the English Working Class while living there, such towns were crucial to understanding the processes of industrialisation and…