Three lads lie on the concrete floor, backs against the wall, laughing at an idle joke. On the brick wall behind them someone, possibly one of them, has scrawled a message in chalk: ‘COPS PISS OFF’. In another photo, one lad teeters on a window ledge on the first floor of a derelict council flat. His mate has already jumped, a broad grin as he heads for the mattresses piled up below him. A crowd of kids watch.

‘Only boring people get bored,’ my mum used to say, and in Tish Murtha’s photographs of working-class youth in 1970s Newcastle, there are plenty of shots of kids making their own entertainment from necessity. There’s a whole bunch forming their own military units with an ad-hoc selection of cap guns and wooden sticks, or jumping up and down on burnt-out cars, or just sitting around, because there’s fuck-all else to do. That was a preoccupation of Murtha’s, whose work is currently the subject of a retrospective at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. Born and raised in Elswick, a working-class area hit hard by the collapse of shipbuilding in Tyne and Wear and the closure of the yard at Elswick Works, Murtha took a number of series of photographs of life in the North East during the late seventies, eighties, and nineties, many of which focused on young people struggling to get by in an era of high unemployment and few opportunities.