Review of ‘Echoes of the Dales, the 80s - Part One’, by Ron Duggins

This review is by Julie Bunting, and was published originally in The Peak Advertiser, the Peak District's local free newspaper, and is reproduced with Julie's kind permission.

Dales photographer Ron Duggins has been busy again, finalising the almost impossible task of selecting this latest volume of images from his massive photographic archive.

Ron took his first press photographs just 50 years ago and holds around 100,000 negatives. His Echoes of the Dales series kicked in with pictures from the 1950s, moving on a decade at a time. The 1980s was such a prolific period of his career that it requires two volumes to even begin to do justice to his collection of events, people and places in and around the Derbyshire Dales.

The recession of 1980 closes a Bakewell factory; Matlock's Lido Restaurant is demolished for redevelopment and the town loses its grammar school. Village street parties celebrate an ill-fated royal wedding; the construction of Carsington Reservoir continues apace; two Dales men are interrogated and fined at an East German border crossing; car parking charges come in and a Youlgrave bakery bows out after nearly 80 years.

A live brown bear turns up at a bar, a couple of lynx are flown out from Riber to France, a little pig poses as a retirement gift and the redoubtable Barbara Woodhouse calls 'walkies' at Cromford Meadows.

Readers are sure to recognise some of the hundreds of faces in these pages - perhaps even their own younger selves, and certainly familiar characters including half-forgotten neighbours, teachers, publicans, shopkeepers, posties and famous visitors to the Dales - remember Cheggers, Roy Castle, Geoff Capes? And oh! the haircuts, oh! the clothes.

Review by Julie Bunting