This is a book of stories that are rarely heard. It’s a book about people who are often marginalised in the media, neglected by politicians, and ignored within society. It’s a book about identity, injustice and inequality, and the social issues that are affecting millions of people across the UK. Most importantly, it’s a book about how people have found hope among the ruins and survived through difficult times.

The idea for this book arose from a documentary I co-directed in 2015. Sleaford Mods – Invisible Britain followed the Nottingham band Sleaford Mods on tour in the run-up to the 2015 General Election, visiting some of the neglected, broken-down and boarded-up parts of the UK that many people prefer to ignore. In each town or city we met with local people and asked how unpopular government policies had changed their areas and what, if anything, they were doing to resist them. To describe the people we met as ‘ordinary’ is to do them a disservice, given the extraordinary efforts they had taken to protect and preserve their communities. From Stockton-on-Tees to Southampton, Barnsley, Lincoln and many other neglected pockets of the UK, what we saw wasn’t ‘Broken Britain’, but rather the front line of nationwide resistance.

On 23 June 2016, the British public voted to leave the European Union in a referendum that divided the UK. The political earthquake shook the foundations of Westminster, but the shocks extended far beyond London to show communities reeling from blows that had begun with the unfettered neoliberalism of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the 1980s. To some, the vote was characterised as a case of forgotten people striking back at a political class that seemed determined to leave them behind. In December 2016, I started to think about how a book of portraits and stories might serve as a vehicle for people whose lives have been blighted by government failures and neglect to have their say. The idea was developed to focus on people affected by social issues including austerity, deindustrialisation, housing, welfare cuts, and the rise in nationalism and xenophobia. In consideration of John Grierson’s formulation that documentary is ‘the creative treatment of actuality’, each story is told by each person in their own voice; less ethnography and more direct testimony.