What IsSootpunk?

Most people have some idea of what Steampunk is.

In its most familiar form, Steampunk asks us to imagine a world where the Industrial Revolution never really ended. Steam power became impossibly advanced. Brass gleams. Airships fill the skies. Inventors are celebrated. Technology is exciting. The machine represents progress, adventure and possibility.

Sootpunk begins somewhere else.

Sootpunk looks at the same machine from the factory floor.

It asks who built it, who owns it, who keeps it running, who becomes wealthy from it and who breathes the smoke.

Sootpunk is not Steampunk with the brass blackened. The machinery is not there simply to look impressive or suggest an alternative path of technological progress.

The machine may be useful, beautiful, oppressive, broken or all four at once.

Sootpunk also shares something with Cyberpunk. However, it is not simply Cyberpunk transplanted into an industrial setting.

Sootpunk is not trapped in the nineteenth century. CCTV cameras, smartphones, databases, automation and artificial intelligence all belong within it.

Cyberpunk often projects corporate surveillance and technological control into the future. Sootpunk imagines that future arriving in a place where the industrial past never left.

A mill owner’s house can overlook the same town as a mobile phone mast, a security camera and an automated factory.

The old machinery and the new technology occupy the same world because they often serve familiar structures of ownership, labour and control.

One of the defining ideas behind Sootpunk is anachronism.

Different periods exist alongside one another, not as a joke or a mistake, as if they have always belonged together.

Nobody living there treats these things as anachronisms.

It is only the visitor who senses that something is wrong.

Sootpunk is not a random collage of interesting objects from different decades. These periods rub against one another because the systems beneath them never entirely disappeared.

The machinery changes. The language changes. The structure underneath survives.

Time in Sootpunk does not travel.

It accumulates.

In many towns across the North, the mills never really disappeared.

Some continued operating long after people elsewhere imagined the industrial age had ended. Others were repurposed as workshops, warehouses or storage. Some stood abandoned for decades, with broken windows, collapsing roofs and the remains of machinery still inside.

For those of us who grew up around them, they were not distant monuments to history. They were part of the everyday landscape.

As teenagers, we explored the abandoned ones, climbing through gaps in fences and broken windows, picking through dust, rust and fragments of the working lives that had filled them.

Many have since been demolished or converted into expensive apartments with exposed brick, tall windows and carefully preserved ironwork.

The building that once held hundreds of workers beneath one owner becomes private housing marketed through the romance of its industrial past.

The mill moves from workplace to ruin to commodity, carrying a different meaning for each generation.

That is another kind of Sootpunk anachronism.

The past has not vanished. It has been abandoned, explored, fenced off, repurposed, gentrified, renamed and sold back to us.

Soot is not just a colour or a texture.

Residue.

It is fuel burned, labour spent, lungs damaged and wealth extracted. It settles into brickwork, clothing and skin, leaving evidence of the machinery that produced it.

In Sootpunk, dirt is never merely decorative.

It tells us who works, who profits and who is expected to live with the consequences.

The wealthy may rise above the smoke; somebody always has to breathe it.

In Harrowden, class is built into the geography of the town. The viaduct separates the wealthy streets above from the workers, punks and Mirefolk living beside the factories and river below.

Mill owners drink brandy behind heavy curtains while the people keeping the town running cough soot into their hands.

The cleaner view enjoyed from above depends upon labour, pollution and hardship being pushed somewhere else.

That is what the soot records.

The punk in Sootpunk is literal.

It is not a suffix added afterwards to make the world sound rebellious.

Punks are part of its streets, pubs, music, clothing and working class culture. Patched jackets, badges, boots, dyed hair, homemade flyers, benefit gigs, graffiti, zines and noisy bands exist alongside mills, canals and industrial machinery.

More specifically, the punk in Sootpunk comes from anarcho‑punk.

It brings class politics, anti‑authoritarianism, mutual aid, direct action and a refusal to wait for permission.

It asks who owns the town, who makes its rules, who controls its history and who benefits from the work carried out there.

Anarchy here does not mean meaningless chaos.

It means people organising from below, looking after one another and creating their own spaces when official structures exclude, ignore or control them.

The people living at the edges of respectable society are central to Sootpunk. The punks, runaways, scavengers, squatters, night workers, misfits and others who never fitted the official picture of town life are not colourful background characters.

They create the music, language, humour and resistance that keep the place alive.

Official history tends to remember mill owners, inventors, grand buildings and civic achievements.

Sootpunk listens to the people who rarely receive statues or plaques.

Punk gives Sootpunk its refusal.

The soot shows what the machine leaves behind.

The punk decides what we do about it.

In Sootpunk, folklore is not sealed away in a remote forest, preserved in a museum or brought out for a heritage festival.

It lives.

The supernatural is not another world. It has become part of the infrastructure.

In Harrowden, the Blackheart Friday Parade might have grown from industrial strikes, older moorland beliefs, an ancient pact or all three at once.

It is a protest, a warning, a ritual and a piece of living folklore, with no clear boundary between them.

Folklore in Sootpunk carries memories that official versions of history cannot entirely contain.

Sootpunk is deeply anti-nostalgic.

I have always had a difficult relationship with the kind of nice Northern painting often found in galleries: an old mill beneath a warm evening sky, a quiet canal catching the light, terraced streets softened by rain or snow.

The industrial North becomes a lost world of honest labour, close communities and simpler times.

I understand why people connect with those images. They can come from genuine affection for a place, family memory and grief for communities that have been damaged or dispersed.

However, I am suspicious of what gets left out.

Not every nostalgic painting is deliberately making a political argument. However, nostalgia can carry a political message through what it removes.

Sootpunk refuses that comfortable version of the past. It does not turn exploitation into heritage, poverty into texture or working class life into attractive scenery.

Sootpunk is not against beauty.

It is against beautification: the cleaning-up of history until its hardship, politics, anger and inconvenient people have disappeared.

Sootpunk is anti‑nostalgia.

It is not anti‑memory.

It wants the past to stop pretending it was harmless.

Sootpunk is not simply a visual style.

A blackened mill or a punk figure beneath a chimney does not automatically make something Sootpunk.

Red skies, soot-covered brick, CCTV cameras, patched clothing and folklore creatures may all belong within it. What matters is the relationship between them.

Harrowden is my expression of Sootpunk, not a fixed template. Sootpunk could grow from coalfields, shipyards, steel towns, railway settlements, quarry villages or other places shaped by industry.

What matters is that it grows from the real history, language, folklore, class divisions and resistance of that place.

It imagines places where the Industrial Revolution never finished dying, where old systems of labour and control survive beneath newer technologies, and where the people pushed to the edges create their own communities, culture and resistance.

Industry shapes the land.

Class decides who bears the cost.

Folklore remembers what official history buries.

Punk refuses to accept the existing order as natural.