Heavy metal: how Janine Wiedel captured the filth and glory of Britain’s industrial 70s

One day in 1978, Janine Wiedel found hell a few streets south of Spaghetti Junction in Birmingham. “The noise was deafening. The heat was intense. I’d never seen anything like it,” she says. In her native US, she’d photographed Black Panthers and student protests at Berkeley in California, but neither prepared her for this industrial inferno, on which one-time West Midlands resident JRR Tolkien reputedly based Mordor.

Inside Smiths’ Drop Forgings were nine 35-hundredweight hammers worked by some of the filthiest men she’d ever seen. The forge had been in operation since 1910 and was typical of the small Birmingham firms that made the city proudly define itself not just as the workshop of the world but as the city of a thousand trades.

This particular forge made couplings for British articulated lorries. A piece of metal was heated in a furnace, then placed beneath one of the hammers. One of Wiedel’s portraits depicts Alan, the stamper, releasing