Note: If you are offended by images of people who may hold political views different to your own, please go elsewhere.

What a tumultuous few years it’s been. Before the drama of COVID-19, the UK was already in political and social turmoil. Brexit, Boris Johnson’s attempted pro-roguing of parliament and Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s drastic cuts to the National Health Service led to waves of protests througout 2019 (at one point almost on a weekly basis).

Photographing protests and demos takes me back to an important point in my photographic journey…and actually the reason I learned darkroom printing. As a University student I volunteered as a photo journalist for the campus magazine (not through some higher ambition, but because I fancied the editor…but that’s another story).

It was another time of huge social and political upheaval. Margaret Thatcher was re-engineering British society: dessimating the industrial north; privatising national assets; and encouraging the ‘greed is good’ rise of the financial institutions in London while imposing a new ‘poll tax’ on the wider population. Just as in 2019, I spent my time back then photographing protests.

This, of course, was way before digital. In those days, we had to submit real prints each week at the editorial meeting where they were considered for publication. They were then whisked off and by some magic transfered to the pages of the mag. We never got our prints back.

I’d been taking photos for many years by then, but I didn’t know how to print. It was one of the other photo-journalists on the magazine who taught me.

I’m eternally grateful to that person, although I no longer remeber his name. He also taught me about pushing film, something which at the time I’d never come across. Anyway…these images take me right back to those times. This is a selection of pro-democracy, pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit images. All the pics on this page are printed on Ilford Classic gloss on 5×7 inch paper. It’s a quick, cheap and easy size to print, which suits the immediacy of the images.