In the exhibition of the same name at Newcastle Contemporary Art, a scene in Harry Lawson’s film ‘Stepney Western’ (2025) brings me close to tears. Ella, the star of the movie (the term Lawson uses), is on speaker phone with her mum, telling her that she has passed her Pony Club ‘D’ test at Stepney Bank Stables, the riding school Ella attends for alternative education provision. The camera is close. We see Ella in profile glancing between the phone and the others she is with, groaning in response to her mum’s pride and a gleeful promise of ‘lots of cuddles.’ With the comic timing we have come to expect, Ella takes the wind out of this emotional peak. She is an outlaw after all. She writes her own story.
The stars of ‘Stepney Western’ are involved in Stepney Bank Stables because it offers an alternative to the institutions they, for whatever reason, have been excluded from. Alongside those of co-stars Mitchell, April, Florence, Grace and David, Ella’s story gives the movie a trajectory as it traces the impact the stables have had on her life. In a conversation that takes place out of shot, Ella’s mum puts this succinctly, saying, ‘She was in trouble, and [then] when she went to Stepney, she was out of trouble.’
Overshadowing the importance of narrative plot in ‘Stepney Western’, however, is an infectious kinetic energy created by cutting constantly between archival material and footage Lawson has shot or staged around life at the stables. There is the momentum of regeneration, a tower block torn down and new infrastructure built up in timelapse. The Tyne and Wear Metro adds velocity and connection as it strides defiantly across landscapes and bridges. Scenes rhythmically cut back and forth between past and present footage of horseshoes being fitted. Sounds from one time and space are layered over one another, pulling us into, or out of it. All of this is quite a ride, but always, just as momentum builds, we are brought back to moments of composure – through static shots of the landscape, like a lineup of electricity pylons revealed through Lawson’s framing to hold a rugged beauty, or footage of Stepney horses and riders walking steadily in step.
Another layer is made up of clips from the young people’s phone videos and TikTok content. A dramatic fall from a horse is caught on a camera phone and we hear the gasp of the person filming. Multiple POV pony ride videos are spliced together, one with hearts floating all around. The young people in the movie are of course already stars of their own social media profiles. Or at least, that is the promise of such platforms. Within the multigenerational lens Lawson’s assemblage movie produces, this mediated absorption could be framed negatively. But Lawson’s editing revels in the language of this shortform content whose lifeblood is sampling and remixing. More meaningfully, the camera’s proximity reveals this activity as collective and full of life. The riders share some good tips, like to go slow mo when the beat drops. In this world there is no distinction between escapism, role play, social realism and documentation.
The movie, although not the whole story of Stepney Western, has been the shared adventure of Lawson and the staff and young people at Stepney Bank Stables since 2023. The project began with Lawson’s idea to set a Western in the formerly industrial, now trendy Ouseburn Valley in Newcastle’s inner East End. As one of the Stepney stars put it at a public programme event at Newcastle Contemporary Art, it then developed with Lawson spending time ‘hanging around at the stables’. Loosely staged scenarios were organised, like scenes filmed at different times of young people gathered around campfires. Workshops were run by Lawson and others, including North-East based artist and musician Jayne Dent who created the movie’s theme tune with Richard Dawson using samples of sound recordings made by the young riders.
The exhibition at Newcastle Contemporary Art continues with a similar sense of cumulative energy. The city centre gallery is on Highbridge, a cobbled one-way street that is home to independent shops and pubs, and alongside the exhibition hosts a programme which connects to and extends into the region. The exhibition’s afternoon opening event, timed to be accessible to the movie’s young stars, included a performance by Jayne Dent of the ‘Stepney Western theme tune’. It also launched The Byker Phoenix, a publication made by Lawson and Newcastle-based design team Foundation Press which revived a 1970s and 80s Byker community magazine, and in this reincarnation, featured commissioned essays by Alex Niven and Kathryn Scanlan. At an event to celebrate the exhibition’s use of archives, Ella read out Niven’s Borderlands essay jointly with its author. Her co-stars then joined her to respond to audience questions. A few of the cast appeared with Lawson in a giddy and informative broadcast on Newcastle’s independent Slacks Radio. On the exhibition’s final day, Lawson gave a tour of the ‘Stepney Western’ mural installed at Byker Metro station, a large-scale public art commission produced in collaboration with illustrator Hannah Gillingham in the style of a classic painted Western movie poster. This was followed, fittingly, by a journey by Metro to the gallery.
Given the programme’s exuberance, Stepney Western’s presentation across Newcastle Contemporary Art’s two expansive galleries is initially striking for its formality. The movie is projected on the first gallery’s long wall with rows of square hay bales in front, which on their own could be a Modernist repeated unit, perhaps referencing industrialized farming. In addition to a row of upright chairs behind them the bales offer seating for the movie’s forty-minute duration. Their lingering musty smell provides a way into the movie’s aesthetic world, and contrasts with the usual expectations of contemporary art environments. The full effect comes later, when, against a backdrop of rush hour traffic and Friday evening drinkers, I see I’ve added a bit of the West by dropping hay on the bus stop floor.
In the second, larger gallery, a single line of framed black and white photographs is hung quite low, skewing what might otherwise be an austere presentation. Two worn leather saddles stand on black metal frames in the centre of the room. The photographs are a curated selection from the archives of Stepney Bank Stables and Amber Film and Photography Collective. Their hanging height, an average of the movie stars’ heights, was decided collaboratively in a workshop with Lawson and Newcastle Contemporary Art. A tall adult might feel out of kilter looming over the works and be prompted to ask whose sightline they are for, a worthwhile question to have in mind.
Continuing the movie’s multi-temporal approach, the images selected here ask how ideas of place are made. While the conceit to cast Byker as the set of a Western connects to the genre’s wider contemporary revival, the photographs make a case for a long-running regional wild west aesthetic held in scenes combining industry, hinterland, fabrication and dereliction. Chris Killip’s photograph from his ‘North-East 1975-1986’ series features a railway cutting diagonally through overgrown grass and shrub against a mountain of gravel and expansive skies. Other than the undoubtedly British anomaly of a single terrace of brick houses, this could, with eyes squinted, be The Badlands. In Henri Cartier Bresson’s ‘Consett’ (1978), two young girls are seen stroking a horse over a barbed wire fence with the foggy silhouette of Consett Steel Works looming up out of a valley behind. Like in moments of the ‘Stepney Western’ movie, we see the landscape in this image through the lens of observers within. As with these other constructed views, a sense of mismatch disrupts the Western genre’s promise of a panorama, of a wide survey of land full of endless opportunity.
Other photographs exhibited ask how young people should spend their time, a question pointedly addressed across Tish Murtha’s entire 1981 Youth Unemployment series. From the series, ‘Jimmy and Carl’ captures a cropped view of two young men in a bricked back yard, a floral netted curtain visible in the window. Their heads are down, they are wearing shirts and are surrounded by useful objects – ladders, a bench, bike tyres – but as the series’ title suggests, their skills are, or are seen to be, unoccupied. Imagine what Jimmy and Carl’s TikToks would have been like.
An untitled photograph by Richard Blosse from 1978 shows two men and two young boys building what I assume to be a huge bonfire about four metres high from scrap wood and furniture. Set in front of a foreshortened Byker Wall, it appears monumental. This image, and Derek Smith’s ‘South Bank’ (1974), showing four children playing in the harsh rocky terrain outside Teesside Iron Steel Works, reminds me of late 1960s adventure playgrounds. Terrifying as they look by today’s standards of health and safety, like the moments captured in these images, they seem almost utopian in the opportunities they offer young people for exploration, risk taking, problem solving and, well, adventure.
What is the expected climax of a Western? A shootout? A victory? The end of a hero’s journey? In the movie Ella’s journey ends with her achievement in being offered a place at Kirkley Hall, a specialist college which provides, alongside other vocational qualifications, the opportunity for specialist education with horses. But this isn’t a story about mainstream standards of progress. Instead, the young rider’s education at the stables unfolded throughout the movie in glimpses. We see moments of care within the formal learning, the gentleness of one instructor letting someone know they hadn’t met the standard this time for their Pony Club test, and informally in the way the young people are valued, listened to and sometimes gently mocked. Another kind of learning is revealed to take place through touch. Echoing Davey Pearson’s photograph, ‘Untitled’, circa 1990 – 2000, of a close up of three hands tending to the mane of a bridled horse, the movie frequently shows hands stroking horses, adjusting their equipment. At one point, Murdoch, a beautiful brown horse, reciprocates this tactile affection, lifting his head up and around to nuzzle the young rider sitting below his pen. The intimacy of what goes on here might be part of what makes its learning alternative. Across the exhibition it is often shown in ways of communicating that bypass words. Not that the young people are short of them.
It takes trust to be involved in a shared adventure. The ‘Stepney Western’ movie sets this theme up early, in a scene when Ella cautions another rider saying they’ve ‘got a lot of trust in that horse’. In the next, the camera holds on Ella’s face reflected in a car wing mirror as her mum tells her people need to know they can trust her. The closeness of footage like this, and the ease of the conversations captured attests to the theme being put into action. Beyond Lawson’s immersion in this community, trust is continued in both directions through the Stepney riders’ involvement as stars and not subjects of this yet unfolding project.
The assembled material in this project could keel over with the weight of regional identity and the iconic nature of the images that have shaped it. It would be easy for this citation to be fawning, deferential or preservationist, but instead, like the world it is portraying, it is full of vitality.
Kate Liston is an artist and writer based in Gateshead.
Stepney Western by Harry Lawson and Archival photographs from Amber Film & Photography Collective, Ouseburn Trust and Stepney Bank Stables, were on show at Newcastle Contemporary Art from 15th March til 26th April, 2025.
This review is supported by Newcastle Contemporary Art.
Published 13.06.2025 by Lesley Guy in Reviews
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