Inherently contrary, the North is resistant to many things: clothing proportionate to its climate, walking on escalators, the self-regard of the South. Above all, it is resistant to definition.

It’s hard to pin down to a particular geography, beyond which lie unflattened vowels and the kind of people who find The Guardian’s Tim Dowling amusing. Less a region, the North is more a sensibility, a feeling. Here Where You Are Standing, the current show in the modernist’s exhibition space in Manchester, captures that feeling in acrylic paints.

The self-taught artist Peter James Houghton paints his North with the tenderness of one who has traipsed its cracked pavements, walked into its driving winds, all the while mindful of the likelihood of being drenched to the bone by carelessly driven double-deckers reckless as to the surface water they plough through. His compact canvases compress that hunched physicality, the weight of elements that rarely seem to abate into the comparative lightness of sunshine. Unpopulated, his concrete tableaux are imbued with the melancholy of better days and higher aspirations, when the material promised to pave the way to the future.

It’s this nostalgic hankering for the clean slate of the newly-built environment, before its lustre was found lacking, before its whitewash began to crack, peel and bloom, that gives the work a specifically Northern ambience. Entangled as it is in the romanticised recollection of childhood and an innocence of the less shuttered-in, shop-worn possibilities, there’s an almost rhapsodic embrace of that dreariness that’s dear because it’s home. It’s the same spirit which gives Morrissey’s Everyday Is Like Sunday its orchestrated uplift. That song’s strains are especially discernible in his monochrome of Bonny Street in Blackpool, the tower a smudge in the background. This is the coastal town they forgot to close down.

Only in Houghton’s Funland is there the slightest glimmer of gold in skies which are more typically painted as overcast, or as blossoming pinkly in a manner that suggests the sun is always just below the horizon. More often, as in his depiction of the Mecca bingo hall in Oldham, his streets are rain-slicked without ever being washed clean.

The buildings themselves, like illustrated plates from the imagined pages of the never-published Observer’s Book of The North, are captured with carefully-considered framing, cropped and angled with something of the photographer’s eye for a shot. For instance, his Heron Foods on Salford’s Mocha Parade is shuttered and graffitied almost to its vanishing point, whereas the lines of The Mall, reflecting cherry blossom pinks, sweep heroically upwards. Houghton’s eye is also keen for surface detail. As well as the intentional textures of Avenham Flats, like hieroglyphs from a lost civilisation of town planners, he pays an almost diagnostic attention in his rendering to the condition of the buildings’ skins; the varicose veins and bruises of carbon monoxide and mould that are the poetry of their neglect.

The irony is that the concrete mourned in Houghton’s acrylic elegies is itself an effacement, a sarcophagus for the now-demolished dreams of an earlier North. For all that, it’s less clear what distinction there will be in today’s glass coffins when they, too, become totems of biographical memory. Right now, however, Houghton’s acrylics serve as a wake to the North’s living memories as it walks without an overcoat into the intemperate winds of its future.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Tontine by Peter James Houghton

 

Here Where You Are Standing is at the modernist in Manchester until February 28, 2026. For more information, click here.