ORDINARY life in a little English City - that's the theme of an exciting new book by a Lancaster-based photographer.

Dave Clark's photographic documentary of life in Lancaster and Morecambe at the turn of the millennium is a fascinating glimpse into the extraordinary worlds of ordinary people.

Simply entitled "A Little English City," it's packed full of images of local people at work and play, focusing on a wide variety of subjects from New Year's Eve revellers, to punk rockers to the flag-waving audience at the Last Night of the Proms.

The ambitious project took 12 months to complete and in that time Dave took an incredible 18,000 photographs which have been used to produce both the book and a well-designed website. Some shots depict famous local landscapes, others are intimate portraits and while the district's obvious beauty shines through in many of the pictures, in others a fly-on-the-wall approach offers little seen glimpses into often overlooked worlds.

It was a labour of love for Dave who is often assigned to take pictures abroad and rarely gets the chance to photograph his home town.

"Over the past ten years I have rarely had the opportunity to take pictures for myself," he said. "It set out to be a personal investigation of the safe haven to which I returned after working away but actually turned out into something very different. Patterns of behaviour began to emerge which I became drawn to and tried to record as best I could. Our obsession with TV screens was something I had never considered but soon became apparent as soon as I started to look at the pictures. Also, I was genuinely shocked when I found rituals to be so much a part of our daily lives, rich and as colourful as anywhere in the world."

Dave's favourite subjects were the particularly British sights of punk rockers and also football fanatics watching a match in packed city centre pub.

Talking about these subjects, Dave said: "Arriving at the Dome I soon realised that the photographer's pit was the space between the beer throwing audience and angry spitting performers. I don't like to think what was in my hair that night but I came away with some great images. Without doubt my favourite subject was the football supporters who provided me with the pent up emotions the British rarely let out in public."

"A Little English City" by DJ Clark is published by Nextnorth Publishing and to check out the website clink on to

www.littleenglishcity.com