Home has been an enduring subject for photographers over the years, proving an especially charged subject when the concept becomes muddied by dislocation or the passing of time; memory and prejudice serving as uncertain substitutes for concrete place. And so it has proved for Robin Maddock, whose second book, God Forgotten Face, focuses on Plymouth – a place he’d never lived in, but with which he has a childhood connection, having spent his early years in Singapore, travelling “back home” regularly to the city where his father was raised.

It therefore stood for Englishness in his formative memory, and Maddock no doubt had ideas about “Broken Britain” in mind when he decided it would make a good follow-up to the book he’d just published, Our Kids Are Going To Hell (BJP #7752), which proved to be an especially prescient investigation of Hackney’s underclass. Shot while accompanying local police on drugs raids, and published two years before widespread rioting broke out across the capital, it captured the authentic underbelly of the now fashionable east London borough that Maddock had made home for the past decade.

Plymouth has its own troubles, but it represents a very different corner of England to the place he’d been living. If a shadow hangs over the south-coast city, it stems back to a harrowing period in Plymouth’s history in the 20th century, “the trauma of the Blitz”, as Maddock puts it. The Luftwaffe launched the first of 59 raids on the city and its neighbouring dockyards in the summer of 1940. The bombardment reached its height the following year when much of the city was reduced to rubble and, by the time they were finished, more than a thousand civilians had been killed. But recovery left its own scars; Plymouth’s redevelopment tearing out much of what was left of the old city in favour of poorly conceived and maintained tower and slab.

This was what made the city interesting for Maddock, of course. “Even as a kid in the 1970s I could sense the strangeness,” he says, “and it’s only just recovering its groove really. I was thinking a lot about Plymouth today compared to a high point of confidence during Elizabethan times. The post‑war city planners destroyed more of old Plymouth than the Germans, so you also get a sense of what a shock this new utopian vision imposed from above must have been like. Seaside towns have another dimension of course – the sea front – and there’s also a long tradition of them being dangerous places. Both are good for taking pictures!”

God Forgotten Face, published by Trolley, which also put together his first publication, was always conceived as a book (although next month it will go on show as an exhibition at the publisher’s gallery TJ Boulting), and in some respects it is a follow-up. “It’s an extension of Our Kids in many ways, because it’s still about our state of happiness in the UK; it’s asking the same kind of questions, such as ‘What do we amount to?’ But Our Kids was easier and more fun because there was a more simple structure to it, and it was not so all-consuming. With Plymouth, I sort of went as an explorer, and quickly realised the work was too detached, too cold. I had to be there a while longer, to have a bit of meltdown to humble my eyes somewhat.”

Any preconceived ideas he had about the city were soon challenged, as was any notion that it would be an easy ride going to shoot something meaningful in a place largely unknown to him. “The night pictures were the real start, when something of a feeling came off and I knew there was more to do. These were part of a look at England at night, but I quickly I realised that was way too big a subject to have much meaning as a project. I was shooting from the hip making quite hard, ugly pictures. I spent so much time shooting in the Drake [Circus] shopping centre and in Primark thinking, ‘This is real life’, but it resists you somehow. In the end you realise that in order to show something, you have to take an oblique view that’s always a fiction. That’s what became clear, and so it also became a document of my time there. And spending more time there was the only way to make it better and resolve these issues.

“The coming together is always very late for me, I shoot very wide then edit down. Gigi Giannuzzi at Trolley Books [which published God Forgotten Face last year, its title misquoted from John Larkin’s poem, Plymouth, but the line seemed to fit] is great for editing and sequencing with as he has so much great experience, and he has a different set of priorities, as well as a brutal honesty. Six months before I finished, I thought it was nearly there, but he told me it looked like I’d just started. I returned from London shocked. I left my girlfriend in Cornwall to live full time again in Plymouth.

“As an outsider with little else to do, it forced me to work and look hard, walking or riding the same streets over and over again. I met so many incredible strong and funny people, and that blew my expectations out of the water. It took me about two months to pluck up courage to go into a really rough-looking muscle gym in Devonport. When I finally went in, this huge guy said, ‘Hello, have you come to train?’ in the most gentle, polite and welcoming way. I thought I’d come flying out the window when I said ‘I’ve come to photograph you lads training’, but they were so generous, and there were so many moments like that, many of which are not in the book for one reason or another.

“There’s probably a novel in it, ‘Things I was wrong about in Plymouth’. I realised the place doesn’t need me or anyone else. Life goes on, and it’s comparatively lucky, you know. Importantly, I realised that Plymouth is part of me and my story, and now it always will be. At some point I could see the work had to be of Plymouth, a product of the place and time, and not simply about Plymouth, a view.”

Visit robinmaddock.com.

God Forgotten Face is published by Trolley Books (ISBN: 978-1907112348), priced £24.99, and is accompanied by an essay In Praise of Blitzed Cities, by Owen Hatherley. The work is shown with some previously unpublished pictures at TJ Boulting, 59 Riding House Street, London W1, until 02 June 2012. Visit www.trolleynet.com and www.tjboulting.com.

Image © Robin Maddock.

Image © Robin Maddock.

Image © Robin Maddock.

Image © Robin Maddock.

Image © Robin Maddock.

Image © Robin Maddock.

Image © Robin Maddock.

Image © Robin Maddock.

Image © Robin Maddock.

Image © Robin Maddock.