Interview - Simon Roberts: Exploring our relationship with the English landscape

These are just a couple of the seemingly incongruous subjects brought into focus by photographer Simon Roberts as part of his We English exhibition, which goes on display at the National Media Museum from today.

Roberts spent 12 months travelling around the country with his family in a motorhome searching for people and places to photograph. It was inspired by a similar trip he made to eastern Europe.

"I was travelling across Russia and I was struck at how connected the people were with their landscape, it's more than just national identity, it's about belonging to the geography of the place and about a metaphorical sense of Russia," he says.

"This got me thinking about nationality and the fact that I didn't feel particularly connected to England in the same way, so I thought it would be interesting to travel around my own homeland.

"I wanted to concentrate on the different ways we spend our leisure time and our relationship with the landscape, because it's the one thing we all share together."

His travels took him all over England. "I went to places I'd never been to before which was fascinating. I went to Ladies Day at Aintree and the Mad Maldon Mud Race in Essex and I think because the photographs relate to how we spend our free time there is an over-riding feeling of optimism."

The end product is what he calls a "national social study" that's based around photography, rather than a long-winded essay.

His Bradford exhibition includes 36 of his photographs alongside a selection from the museum's own collection, including works by Roger Fenton and Tony Ray Jones.

Roberts, who spent four years as a geography student at Sheffield University, found Yorkshire's landscape bountiful. "I met a couple at Malham who've been going to the same place for 50 years. They sit by their car with a flask of tea and look at the landscape and they said the only thing that had changed was a new tractor on one of the farms and the salt bins on the side of the road," he says.

"I also did a photograph of a Muslim couple walking in the Peak District near Stanage Edge. It's quite a loaded picture because we tend to think of our parks as a mainly white, middle class preserve, so that was interesting."

He believes that although the way we interact with the landscape has changed over the years, some similarities remain. "Many people still do the same things that previous generations did such as going for a picnic on a beach – the only thing that's changed is what we're eating and wearing."

The We English exhibition is free to enter and is on display at the National Media Museum, Bradford, until September 5.