Will the real Britain please stand up?

An interim update on my travels around deprived parts of my homeland

If your inbox has been quiet recently, at least measured in newsletters from me, that is because I have been busy visiting and photographing various deprived parts of England. My travels have taken me to:

• Broadwater Farm Estate in London, whose concrete expanses experienced riots in the 1980s, as well as Stonebridge Park’s ethnic diversity.

• Byker in Newcastle, a famous redevelopment of former slums, as well as neighbouring Heaton.

• Park Hill in Sheffield, a monument to brutalist architecture.

• North Ormesby in Middlesborough, with dilapidated terraces near where industry used to be, as well as neighbouring South Bank.

• Dewsbury in Yorkshire, whose Savile Town subdivision is almost totally inhabited by those of South Asian descent and strict Islamic outlook.

• The County Durham mining villages of Ferryhill and Easington Colliery, where there is long-term poverty following the closure of their pits in the 1960s and 1990s respectively.

I have a variety of other potential destinations in mind. Each trip takes time, processing the images takes time, posting them to social media takes time, and then creating articles around the key themes takes time. I am grasped with a potential deadline of 9th June as the petrodollar may gasp its last breath, and who knows what comes next. So my priority has been to get around and see places I wouldn’t ordinarily go, in order to educate myself about the reality on the ground, as well as have encounters that are outside of my personal norm.

I will do separate articles on the specific places I have been to and local themes I have noticed, and stick to general observations in this interim update. The first thing I have to say is that it has given me a lot to think about, and been quite an emotional experience. I am seeing my country through fresh eyes post-Covid: we have had a government that despises us and is willing to kill us, and that casts a harsh new light on everything that has happened, at least since WW2, if not way further back. Just the fraudulent mortgage industry alone has raped us financially, and it shows.

The context of remedy for treason — all of it including weaponised migration — shifts the “Overton window” of what may be coming, and very far to the right of anything I have ever contemplated. I am seeing these people and places through the eyes of having participated in a covert war, albeit from the public rather than clandestine side. Going outside of your usual “roaming zone” and into neighbourhoods that make you uncomfortable or despondent is not always easy, but I can recommend it. Better to see the world for what it really is, than live a fantasy.

Each of these places has been utterly distinct, even if notionally in the same category of suffering from deprivation. (You can browse a UK deprivation map here.) Their ethnic makeup, their local history, their economic blight, their dilapidations, their prospects, their cultural cohesion — they are not the same. Some of what I have seen has really surprised me, and in both the positive and negative directions. I am used to cosmopolitan London with its patchwork of immigrant communities — check out the map of second languages. That hadn’t prepared me for the wide and wild variation elsewhere.

What I also didn’t expect was that my camera is a two-way device. The lens points forward, but the “black mirror” screen looks back and reflects the photographer. By seeing “other” in a new light, I have also come to reflect upon “self” in ways I had not anticipated. In particular, the lack of soil in some of the concrete jungle type places has had me reminisce about my own family connection to the land, via a farm in Wales run by my grandparents. I am having conversations around mother country and “fatherland” that I did not have before; those terms were too loaded and taboo.

There are times when I almost want to cry, knowing what I now know. So many innocent victims of economic and social warfare. As someone with a private education, Ivy League type degree, blue chip career, name recognition, public presence, and professional connections — these places are not my natural habitat as I can too easily ride above where the underclass lives. It’s not just going to one deprived area, but the cumulative impact of seeing many in succession, that has had an impact upon me. One was way worse than expected (Dewsbury) and one way better (Byker). You have to make the effort and get a decent sample size to see the commonality and outliers.

The big “aha!” is that the physical poverty and degradation is perhaps less important than the moral, cultural, and spiritual state of the nation. I will have to return to this in future, but the essence is that each area not only provided sightseeing, but also many personal encounters, as if often the case when walking the streets with a professional grade camera. Each person I met may be an anecdote, but the sense of friendliness or hostility does start to show through. I could belong to some of these communities, but others are entirely alien to me, and in a way that forebodes trouble. My sense is that the multi-cultural experiment has now got its results in, and changes are inevitable.

Often before I go out, I have had to motivate myself a bit — “I don’t want to drive that far, spend that much on fuel, risk being mugged, not find anything interesting, be depressed by ugliness”. Yet each time I have come home delighted in some way, and it has been way better than foreign tourism to honeypot sites! Every single outing has presented people and places I could not have foreseen, and that was memorable and valuable in some way. The camera is an intrinsic part of it: not only forcing me to be attentive, but also a way of triggering engagement with the locals, for better or worse. Just going for a walk without one doesn’t quite have the same effect.

To love your country is not only to eulogise about the pretty parts that are easy to celebrate. Going to see some of the most brutalised and downtrodden bits of Britain has paradoxically been one of the happiest experiences I have ever had, even if the feeling in the moment might be despair and grief at the damage and decline. This is especially true after Covid trashed small business venues as well as the population’s psyche. We can build a better world, but the first step is doing an inventory of the one we already have — while we can.

I hope that at least a few of you are inspired to go on anthropological adventures nearer to your own locality, and explore the socioeconomic terrain.