I’ve found myself looking back quite a lot lately. It started with a few old photographs at home, the sort that sit quietly in drawers for years until something prompts you to take another look. One thing led to another, and before long I was sharing a handful of my old school photos on the Ralph Gardner High School Facebook page. Seeing other people’s photos appear alongside them, each with their own small piece of memory attached, created a steady sense of recognition. It is a strange thing how a building, long gone, can still feel so present when enough people remember it at once.
That feeling of nostalgia stayed with me, and it eventually turned into the idea for a painting. I wanted to recreate the main entrance to the school, that most people knew simply as “Ralphie’s.” It was the face of the place, the point everyone passed through at some time or another, and it seemed the right place to begin. The difficulty, of course, is that the building is no longer there. It was demolished in 1994, the same year my year group finished, making us the final intake to complete our time there before it closed. What remains now is memory, and memory is not always precise.
To piece it together, I went back through the Facebook page and searched for any photographs that showed the front of the building. There was no single image that captured it exactly as I needed, so it became a process of gathering fragments. One photograph would show the top windows clearly, another the doorway from an angle, another the lower windows and brickwork. Slowly, by comparing and adjusting, the structure began to take shape again.
Once the building was in place, the painting needed life – so I added figures across the scene, loosely inspired by the style of Lowry, keeping them simple and slightly abstract, but giving each one just enough variation to suggest an individual. The red jumpers became the unifying feature, immediately recognisable and tied to the identity of the school. There is no single moment being depicted. Instead, it is a general sense of movement, of pupils crossing paths, heading in different directions, existing within the same shared space.
It was an enjoyable piece to work on. There is something satisfying about rebuilding a familiar place from memory and fragments, then filling it with the kind of life it once held. More than anything, it felt like a quiet way of acknowledging a time and place that still matters to a lot of people.
I hope that anyone who attended the school, or grew up in North Shields, might recognise something in it. Not necessarily every detail, but the overall feeling. If it brings back a memory or two, then it has done what I hoped it would.
