Pursued by bulldozers
For fifty-six years Charlie Rogers painted the back lanes, pubs, churches and corner shops of Tyneside, often days or weeks before the demolition crews arrived. Around a thousand works survive. This is the archive of what he saw, and of what is gone.
“As fast as Tyneside’s characteristic buildings fall, Charlie Rogers seems to be there to catch them.”
Tom Pickard, 1973
In 1964, aged thirty-four, Charlie took a heavy knock to a damaged knee in a cup tie and was signed off for a week. Limping to his aunt’s house on Bensham Road, he sat with a cup of tea and looked out at the back lane opposite. Over five or six mornings he painted it. The street was demolished soon after.
He spent the rest of his life racing the bulldozers, and credited it all to the half-back who crippled him.
The story
From a footballer sidelined by a knee injury to four Royal Academy summer shows. Fifty-six years at the easel he never owned.
The work
Around a thousand paintings, organised the way the book is: Gateshead, Newcastle, Paris, family, characters and more.
Places
The streets he painted, marked extant or demolished. Half of the buildings here are gone.
People
Ann, Pop, Charlie Junior, Norman Cornish and the collectors who kept the work together.