Charlie Rogers, Pursued by Bulldozers

The organising idea of the book is a phrase Charlie used to describe his own practice: "I feel I have spent much of my career being pursued by bulldozers." From the mid-1960s onwards, he raced demolition crews across Gateshead and Newcastle, painting Victorian terraces, corner shops, churches, and archways in the weeks and days before they came down. The photographer Trevor Ermel was doing the same work with a camera, and throughout the book his black-and-white images of condemned scenes are placed alongside Charlie's paintings of the same locations, making a quiet record of what was lost.

Alongside the paintings and photographs, the book gathers voices from across Charlie's life. Writer Michael Chaplin contributes a foreword; there are tribute essays by poet Tom Pickard (written in 1973) and arts journalist David Whetstone (1988); and collector Dennis Donnelly, who bought nearly 200 paintings over three decades, offers a 50-year memoir of friendship and accumulation. Designed by BDI (Rob Barnes) and printed in Gateshead.

The book's central argument is that Charlie Rogers belongs in the company of L. S. Lowry and Norman Cornish as one of the three defining chroniclers of post-war working-class life in northern England. Where Lowry recorded industrial Salford and Cornish the mining streets of Spennymoor, Charlie Rogers painted Tyneside with the same unflinching affection, over a career that saw him exhibited four times at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and once received by Princess Margaret. The book is a first step towards establishing that recognition.