Hammer houses

American photographer Janine Wiedel documented filthy workers risking their lives in the mills, mines and forges of the late 1970s English Midlands

- Stuart Jeffries

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 (around 1,800kg) 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 firms that made the city proudly define itself as the workshop of the world and the city of a thousand trades.

This particular forge made couplings for articulated lorries. A piece of metal was heated in a furnace, then placed beneath a hammer. One of Wiedel's portraits depicts Alan, the stamper, releasing the rope that dropped the hammer about two and a half metres with an ear-splitting smack. No wonder heavy metal originated in the West Midlands: Ozzy Osbourne and Tony Iommi, who lived a few streets away, probably heard these hammers before they formed Black Sabbath.

"I don't think there was one person who said they didn't want to be photographed. They were just pleased, I think, by the fact that someone was taking an interest in their jobs."