Selection Exhibition: Picturing High Streets

Taking my Dad to the barbers on the high street was one of our regular ‘trips out’ so I was really chuffed when this photograph of him, taken in a Turkish barber shop on Newport Pagnell High Street in Milton Keynes, was selected as one of 65 winning photographs for the national Picturing High Streets project.

The World on the High Street is part of a project led by Photoworks in partnership with Historic England and FORMAT, documenting the changing nature of England’s high streets between 2021 and 2024.

The project brought together professional photographers, communities and members of the public, creating a visual record of life on our high streets. More than 10,500 public submissions were received, with selected photographs becoming part of the project’s national collection.

The exhibition first opened at FORMAT Festival in Derby before travelling to Bristol and later to The Photographers’ Gallery in London. The photographs have also been displayed in shop windows in Prescot and Middlesbrough, as well as on Clear Channel digital advertising screens across the country.

What makes this particularly special to me is that The World on the High Street will enter the Historic England Archive, preserving this small, everyday moment in my father’s life as part of the visual history of England’s high streets. A photograph taken in a local Turkish barber shop, of my 93-year-old Dad, has travelled across the country and will now become part of a national archive.

I couldn’t be prouder of him — or of the story this photograph has been able to tell. I did tell him that he was now famous and on billboards around the country but he was much more interested in tucking into his chocolate cake and café latte in his favourite caff up on the high street.