North London Nights

As we crashed awake at 2am to a cacophony of broken glass, shouts and outraged screams, my wife, eyes wide, turned and gripped my arm and hissed….. ‘where the fuck have you brought me?’…..After five years in Kosovo (where we met) and another five in Brooklyn, New York, where the only raised voice we heard from our apartment threatened to ‘f**ck’ someone up ‘in a New York minute’, we had re-located to an apartment in leafy north London, Muswell Hill to be precise, home to good schools and hugely expensive houses. Our first weekend introduced us with terrible clarity to something that my wife had never experienced and that I had somehow forgotten in my decade away, British drinking culture.

These photographs were taken from our apartment windows over the course of eighteen months, usually on weekend nights between the hours of 1.00am to 4.00am when the pub-goers and club-goers were emptying out and thinking of calling it a night.

In the time honoured British tradition, the melee on the streets caused by closing time and too much alcohol often had explosive results. These photographs though are not about specific people or a specific place, they could have been taken anywhere in the UK. They are more about a drinking culture that has become so entrenched and deep rooted in our way of life that the violence that erupts on British streets every Friday and Saturday night has become accepted as normal. Alcohol stands tall in Government statistics, nearly half of all violent crime and 40% of domestic violence are linked to it, the National Health Service spends almost £3.5 billion per year dealing with the consequences of it, but people in the UK spend £15 billion a year buying it, and maybe that's the most important figure of all.

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