Nottinghamshire born and Greater Manchester based filmmaker Brett Gregory (director of the self-financed, coruscating, and multi-award winning 2022 indie feature Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist and the 2024 short film adaptation of Kafka’s Before the Law), returns to his documentarian roots for his latest production. Autism and the Arts is an intimate and non-profit study of Peter Street, a 76 year old autistic poet and memoirist from Bolton, Lancashire.
Street was born in the Irish Catholic community of Aspull (near Wigan), in 1948 – the product of a sexual assault upon his mother. As Street relays in the film, the story goes that his mother’s attacker was convinced to do right by her and marry her, only for his mother to tell him to piss off at the altar and march straight out of the church. Following such a traumatic start in life, Street and his mother moved to Bolton where the young boy continued to struggle, suffering from epilepsy and illiteracy that made him an easy target at school. As his later writings show, these palpable differences made him feel like the black sheep of the family and, to some extent, to wider society in general. There was one other reason why Street felt such isolation, and it didn’t come to light until the 2010s when, at the age of sixty-six, he was diagnosed with autism.
Prior to that revelation, Street left school and entered a succession of diverse jobs that included working as a slaughterman and a gravedigger, and it was in the latter role that he began enjoying the camaraderie of his fellow workers – until an accident at work led to Street breaking his neck. It was during his hospitalisation that he discovered poetry, and because of his lived experience he found that he had a knack for writing verse – publishing his first collection shortly after and receiving a grant from the Royal Literary Fund. He went on to become a writer-in-residence at BBC Radio Manchester, worked with convicts, and served as a war poet during the Croatian/Bosnian conflict of the 1990s.
The rewarding partnership of a working class documentary filmmaker and his working class writer subject came about by serendipitous means in January of 2025. Street was pleased to see another Northern working class creative claiming their space in a cultural landscape that’s become over-saturated with voices from the upper middle class, so totally out of the blue he reached out to Gregory on LinkedIn. During their conversation an idea developed to showcase Street’s poetry and personality, and as Gregory freely admits it seemed “a bit random, (but) it might actually work!”.
Accompanying by a reading of John Clare’s “I Am”, Gregory takes his camera around the hills and becks that surround Street’s hometown of Bolton, capturing a beauty and tranquillity of the area and eradicating the fallacious stereotype that “it’s grim oop North”.
It does indeed work, and the project once again highlights Gregory’s desire to commit to the screen the truth of the working class experience, especially where innate intelligence and creativity are often cruelly overlooked.
In Autism and the Arts: Poetry with Peter Street, Gregory explores a topic that’s common across all of his work – the marginalisation of the working class voice. In previous productions like Nobody Loves You …, Gregory explored the prejudice, disempowerment and exclusion that intelligent working class people are subjected to because their experiences and outlooks don’t fit the stereotypes perpetuated by the establishment and the academic elite. With Peter Street, Gregory found someone who faced a discrimination that was two-fold of discrimination – the first fitting the director’s usual theme of prejudice against the working class, while another related directly to Street’s neurodiversity.
Both chimed on a deeply personal level with me as I’m a working class writer who never went to university and still lives in the same deprived town in the north west that I was born in, but I’m also autistic and, like Street, didn’t receive a diagnosis until late in life (some four years ago, at the age of forty-one, to be exact). Knowing what I know now, I completely understand how, in my youth, I felt that the channels and pathways that I saw others navigate with ease were simply unavailable to me or impenetrable. The allistic world isn’t designed for neurodiverse people, and if you factor in a working class background on top autism, then it’s almost impossible to achieve and succeed in a class-based society. A film like this is important because it shows that people like Peter Street can create their own space within our culture, and they can do it on their own terms with a body of work that unapologetically and directly speaks of their struggles.
Autism and the Arts: Poetry with Peter Street is visually quite a traditional documentary, presenting Street in the “talking head” format as he recounts the story of his life from his front room in Bolton. This lack of frills significantly benefits the documentary as it gives the audience no opportunity to focus on anything other than Street himself. As a result his words, and particularly his poetry readings, connect with the viewer on a deeply rewarding level. There is, however, a glimpse of another of Gregory’s preoccupations at the start of the film, and that’s his desire to banish once and for all the long-standing, lazy cliché that the North of England is a dour and declining, post-industrial landscape.
Accompanying by a reading of John Clare’s “I Am”, Gregory takes his camera around the hills and becks that surround Street’s hometown of Bolton, capturing a beauty and tranquillity of the area and eradicating the fallacious stereotype that “it’s grim oop North”. The decision to open with Clare is also a telling one as the nineteenth century writer was the son of a farm labourer who was often labelled as “the peasant poet”. He suffered a life of discrimination and alienation, which was exacerbated by bouts of mental illness that led to periods spent in various asylums. By using Clare’s verse alongside the greenery of Bolton’s surroundings, Gregory draws a parallel between the experiences of a working class artist from almost two hundred years ago, and those of Street today.
