May 15, 2025 |
“Who and where holds cultural capital?” asks Victoria Gill on the opening page of her new photobook Melanie & The Miners’ Strike, released via cult imprint Idea. “It always seemed like it was elsewhere, well certainly, funding has gone elsewhere,” she snaps, citing her hometown of Leeds as the context for this realisation. She doesn’t end up answering the question, but, going on to discuss the book’s subject – photos she found underneath a bed depicting her mum, Melanie, and her friends at 18-year-old – she hardly needs to.
Melanie turned 18 in 1984, a year famed in mining communities as the one where Margaret Thatcher and her government started closing coal pits en masse. As a result, unemployment in these areas soared, with the phrase “close a pit, kill a community” becoming commonplace to describe the impact of the prime minister’s policies. Over 187,000 miners are recorded to have gone on strike as a result, regularly being met with hostility and violence from police. It was a watershed year that left enduring scars on the communities most affected. “Cultural capital,” as Gill puts it, in the traditional sense of a burgeoning high arts scene catalysed by disposable cash, wasn’t present in droves. Frankly, these communities had bigger fish to fry.
Culture, however, can always thrive in its own way, as shown by the photos Gill found in those photo boxes under the bed. “They were just her memories,” says Gill of the coming-of-age scenes depicted, which show the subjects dancing in nightclubs, getting ready in their bedrooms and sporting every hairstyle the ‘80s had to offer. If it was crimped, twisted, shaven or spiked, flopped over foreheads in wispy fringes or towering atop crowns in theatrical mullets, Gill’s mum and her mates wanted in. Speaking on why she wanted the images to be published, Gill says it was to convey this idea of “a reverse cultural capital” which showed “a different snippet of the North and a chance to look at these images from people who do not class themselves as artists or photographers.” Given the socio-economic context, the images feel defiant, even if they do not mean to be. Including Miners Strike in the title, Gill says, came from this juxtaposition.
Therein lies the beauty of these photos. Intended to be quick snaps of a group of friends living their lives – laughing at pubs, family gatherings and dancing into the early hours – the images act as a peephole into the culture of Leeds at the time. Not the upper-echelon, grand theatre kind; the kind enjoyed and embraced by common people. “A slice of Leeds during the mid-’80s they wouldn’t have seen otherwise, from genuine weekends and nights out after work,” says Gill of what she hopes people will take away from the book.
Collating the images for this project was a personal endeavour for Gill as well as a practice of sharing them with others. “My mum and I are close, so I grew up with a strong undercurrent of the book’s themes,” she says. “Learning stories from my mum’s friends about the DJs, the drinks, the getting ready process and how relationships started and broke down helped me fill in gaps that I would not have just got from my mum alone.”
Luckily, the stories Gill talks about are shared, in part, with the readers too, through small captions which accompany a selection of the images. “I had my first drink of Asti in your mum’s bedroom getting ready, with your grandma popping in to chat to us,” reads one. Another, accompanying an image of Gill’s mum and her friend – fag and pint in hand – reads, “Why was my lipstick smudged? I don’t know, drinking, snogging.” It feels like reading someone’s diary; one that’s uniquely personal but at the same time widely relatable.
The images in Melanie & The Miners’ Strike are wonderfully unassuming yet still manage to teach us about both the continuity of the human experience and the figure it assumed during that time – one that was dressed in shiny polyester and soundtracked by synth-pop.
If you like the look of these snaps, you don’t have to wait too long to grab a copy of the book. In celebration of Photo London, Dover Street Market will launch a series of exclusive products available to buy in-store, of which Gill’s book will be available. Head down on May 15 to make sure you don’t miss out. Discover more here.
Photography courtesy of Victoria Gill.
