In his 'Little poems in prose' Baudelaire talks about feeling drunk on the promiscuity of the crowds on the Paris boulevards. There would soon be a mini-genre in painting: the rag-picker, who lived in a no-man's land at the edge of the city which doesn't immediately become countryside. Sociology had to be invented to expole new ways of living. Britain has made a big contribution in the work of Raymond Williams and that of Stuart Hall and colleagues in Birmingham. Steve Hanson recently published a superb catalogue essay for a photographic project on the Oldam Road in Manchester by Charlie Meecham. Another compliment I would pay Steve is that I get echoes of another explorer of these working-class landscapes, Ray Gosling. The exigences of a certain version of progress, and its inevitable upheavals and messes are endlessly defended as 'realistic'. As George Orwell might have said, they are a whole lot more real for some than for others. ~ Dr Robert Galeta, Lecturer, Bradford School of Arts and Media, Bradford College, and translator of Deleuze's Cinema 2.