'The chaser of a disappearing world'

The Quarry Hill flats in Leeds were once the largest social housing complex in the UK. A utopian vision of homes for 3,000 people. Built in the 1930s, they were modelled on the Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna and La Cité de la Muette in Paris. However, after just 40 years, the buildings were crumbling and largely deserted. Over five years in the 1970s, Peter Mitchell documented their demolition, from smashed windows and wrecked apartments to abandoned wardrobes and solitary shoes.

- Dave Simpson

Finally, when all that was left standing was a lone arch, he tried to photograph the wrecking crew standing in front of it, but couldn't get the arch in.

"So," Mitchell remembers, "the foreman said, 'We do have a crane. I can't stand heights but they lowered the crane down so I could stand on it, then lifted me up to quickly get the shot. I was swaying about a bit and all but one of them came out blurred - but I got the picture."

Now 82, Mitchell is one of the 20th century's most important early colour photographers and social historians. He has been called "a narrator of how we were, a chaser of a disappearing world". Yet he insists he just photographs "things that take my eye. Sometimes, I'd see something and think, 'I'll come back when it's not raining.' Then I'd go back and it had been knocked down."

We're talking ahead of his London exhibition Nothing Lasts Forever. We meet in the ornate tiled cafe of Leeds Art Gallery, which hosted the exhibition last year and first showed his photos in 1975, when it was the City Art Gallery.

Mitchell's work exudes warmth and empathy.

Some of his most powerful images capture people in the workplace and the dignity of their labour.