Hosted by SCUL Collective members Peter Dixie and Tom Westbury, the SCUL Sessions are a series of talks and presentations featuring contemporary practitioners using photography to explore land use and landscape around the UK.

SCUL Sessions #3: Eric Tearle

Following on. from the success of Wayne Ford presenting 'SPTA: a Landscape in Service' and Richard Chivers presenting 'Where Two Rivers Collide' , in SCUL Sessions #3 we will be welcoming Eric Tearle to present his ongoing project Beneath the Grey

Book your place (Eventbrite)

Image ©Eric Tearle, used with permission

15 August 2026
6.30pm
October Books
189 Portswood Road
Southampton, SO17 2NF

This is a FREE event but donations are very welcome to help us cover our costs.
All are welcome, but spaces are limited so booking is essential.

Britain has always had a complicated relationship with its own landscape. We speak of green and pleasant land, of countryside and coastline as national inheritance, yet the evidence of what we have done — and continue to do — to that land surrounds us, unremarked, in plain sight. These photographs were made across England and Wales over a period of These photographs were made across England and Wales over a period of several years. They do not document dramatic moments of environmental catastrophe. There are no dead fish, no foaming rivers, no protesters in high-visibility jackets. Instead, they record something quieter and, I would argue, more troubling: the ordinary texture of a country that has grown accustomed to its own deterioration. Much of what these images show is the consequence of modernisation — not Much of what these images show is the consequence of modernisation — not absorbed into the functional landscape of new developments and trading estates. The green spaces that remain do so by accident rather than design, surviving in the shadows. Wildlife adapts or disappears. And when the cost of responsible disposal becomes prohibitive, waste finds its own destination. When regulatory oversight weakens, water companies discharge without meaningful consequence. The damage is rarely the result of a single decision or a single person — it accumulates through planning policies, budget cuts and regulatory frameworks that have quietly permitted it for decades. The cost of getting modern is paid quietly, and unevenly, by everything that was already there.

Britain is not a country in sudden crisis. It is a country in slow conflict with itself — with its own responsibilities, its own promises, its own image. These photographs do not resolve that conflict. They simply refuse to look away from it.

Learn more on Eric’s Instagram: @ericisdeadd