Life in the Thatcher Era, Along Britain’s Longest Thoroughfare

It can be no coincidence that a version of Thatcher’s blue recurs, in different incarnations, throughout Graham’s book. It is the blue of the overalls of the lorry driver seated with a teacup at a table in a run-down service station in South Mimms, Hertfordshire, looking over his shoulder toward an unseen window. It is the blue of the apron of the café assistant at the Compass Café, in Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, who stands against a reproduction-wood wall, the pinstripes of her smock recalling those of the affluent young man against the Bank’s imposing stone. It is the blue of the crisp denim jacket worn by the young man in “Couple on Day Trip, Washington Services, Tyne and Wear,” who stands grimacing with his arm around the shoulder of a young woman in a smart white pin-striped jacket, both of them with violently yellow-peroxided hair.

Graham was in his mid-twenties when he started photographing along the Great North Road. He could not have known that Thatcher—whose birthplace, Grantham, in Lincolnshire, is along the A1—would remain Prime Minister until 1990, remaking Britain from an admittedly somewhat lurching and enfeebled industrial economy into a nimbler, crueller one based on financial services. The processes she set in motion would make a lasting division in the nation, especially between its more affluent south and the towns and cities that lie farther up the Great North Road. Even in the first years of the eighties, indications of the radical impact of her policy choices were detectable. Manufacturing jobs were being decimated; cuts were being made to social benefits; and unemployment, especially among the youth, was rising. The service station at which the bottle-blond pair was photographed is on the outskirts of the city of Sunderland, a formerly powerful industrial town with a history of shipbuilding and mining. Local coal miners took part in Britain’s brutal yearlong national miners’ strike in the mid-eighties, but the area’s pits were closed by the early nineties. The last shipbuilding yard was shuttered in 1988, in what the leader of Sunderland City Council called at the time “an act of economic vandalism, unparalleled in the history of this country.” The brows of people like the young couple—and other working-class people pictured in the book—would surely grow only more furrowed in the years after Graham captured them, as local opportunities for work, and what had been a given as a way of life, slipped away. Meanwhile, no doubt, the smiles of the London bankers would grow broader still.