The Long Road to Margaret Thatcher’s Britain
The first image in Paul Graham’s book “A1: The Great North Road,” which was originally published in 1983 and is being reissued this month by Mack, shows two men in business attire standing against the creamy white stone of the Bank of England, in the City of London. One man, dressed in a blue suit, smiles broadly as he holds a piece of notepaper toward his younger companion, who wears navy-blue pinstripes and an equally broad grin. The bright-blue necktie of the older man is flopped over his raised arm, its hue matching that of a handsome coat and scarf worn by an older woman who is entering the frame on the right. The composition—completed by a shadowy figure on either side of the central trio—offers a striking arrangement of color and light.
To a British viewer, especially one old enough to remember the early nineteen-eighties, the image says something else, too. The brilliant-blue shade of the tie and the coat is the color of the party rosettes worn by the Tories, who had come to power in 1979 under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. It was a favorite in Thatcher’s wardrobe: she wore a suit of the same bright blue on the day of her victory, when she took occupancy of 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister and declared her aims in lofty terms to television cameras: “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony; where there is error, may we bring truth; where there is doubt, may we bring faith.” Whether or not Thatcher did bring any of those things in the transformative, and frequently contentious, eleven years of her premiership, she certainly brought about the deregulation of the financial markets, the glee over which seems prefigured in the countenances of Graham’s two young executives.
The photograph is an appropriate first milestone on a viewer’s journey through “A1: The Great North Road,” a chronicle of Britain’s longest thoroughfare, which extends about four hundred miles, from London to Edinburgh. The route was once a path for stagecoaches and mail coaches known as the Great North Road, but by 1983 it had been superseded by the faster M1 motorway. The users of the A1, Graham wrote in his original introduction to the book, “were no longer travellers who would use their journey to bear witness to the landscape, but merely people to whom crossing the length of the country simply meant completing a journey from A to B, as fast, efficiently, and blindly as possible.” During several journeys taken over a period of two years, Graham photographed the countryside through which the road passes: from the sodden fields of Bedfordshire, flooded under an inclement June sky in 1982, to the rainy forecourt of a Little Chef service station in Cambridgeshire, where a man stares glumly through a window and the words “SAFE JOURNEY” are painted in white on gray asphalt outside, to the blue skies over Ferrybridge, West Yorkshire, streaked with billowing clouds from the Ferrybridge Power Station.
Graham was an early adopter of color photography, and his images belie the stereotype of Britain in the early eighties as gray and drained. At Blyth Services in Nottinghamshire, Graham shot a Bible, bound in red and set upon a small white table tucked into the corner of a room with blue-painted walls—an almost sculptural arrangement in what the caption reveals is a bedroom for drivers. In another image, a verdigris-colored ashtray at Morley’s Café, in Markham Moor, Nottinghamshire, glows like a precious relic. The book’s concluding image—a shot of the top of an emerald-green vehicle against emerald-green walls, in a room lit by white skylights from which hang red-and-white illuminated signs with the brand names Singer and Humber—pops as if it had been taken under the high skies of Route 66.
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.
