The Long Road to Margaret Thatcher’s Britain
Key takeaways
- 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.
- “Young Executives, Bank of England,” November, 1981.To a British viewer, especially one old enough to remember the early nineteen-eighties, the image says something else, too.
- The route was once a path for stagecoaches and mail coaches known as the Great North Road, but by 1983 it had been superseded by the faster M1 motorway.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 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.
“Young Executives, Bank of England,” November, 1981.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.
“Looking Back on the City, Highbury, North London,” March, 1982.“Company Representative, Leeming Services, North Yorkshire,” November, 1982.“Woman at Bus Stop, Mill Hill, North London,” November, 1982.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.