John R Hume is Scotlands foremost expert on industrial heritage. Johns greatest passion was and is industry. Over the course of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, he took over 25,000 photographs of late-industrial and post-industrial Scotland. His collection is a remarkable portrait of a way of life that has now all but vanished. His drive to act as a witness to Scotlands industrial empire, and its steady disintegration, took him to every corner of the country.

Johns photography produces an exhaustive and objective record. Yet it also reveals remarkable and poignant glimpses of domestic life children playing in factory ruins, high-rises emerging on the city skylines, working men and women dwarfed by the incredible scale of an already crumbling industrial infrastructure.

In A Life of Industry, author Daniel Gray tells Johns story, and the story of what has been lost and preserved.