In The Living Room: At Home With The Working Class in The 1980s

“Everything centred on the living room – it’s where everyone met and congregated”
– Nick Walpington on his Living Room project

 

 

Time to step back inside British homes in the late 1980s with photographer Nick Waplington’s Living Room series. Published as a book in 1991, the photographs document the lives of friends, family and neighbours on Nottingham’s Broxtowe housing estate, where Waplington spent many years.

“When I thought something was going to happen,” he says, “I’d pick up the camera and take some pictures very quickly, then not take any for a while. You don’t want to be working all the time in a documentary-esque situation, because otherwise it becomes about you and the camera. It’s about having an instinct for when something is going to happen.”

 

 

The image above, he says, “was made during half-time in an England World Cup match in the 80s outside my grandfather’s house. He was a parts man at a British Leyland garage so people would bring their cars over to have them fixed.”

 

 

“This is early in the morning on a typical weekday, with everyone having a smoke before taking the kids to school and heading out to work”

 

 

“This boy is about 10 years old so I chose not to use it at the time. Now he’s in his 40s, it doesn’t matter. I like to make pictures with things happening on the periphery and space in the centre of the image to heighten the tension”

 

 

“This is a typical living room scene from the late 80s; the woman on the left had 14 children including two sets of twins. These are three of her daughters. I would spend hours just hanging out sitting on the floor waiting for something to happen while playing with the kids. Occasionally I would take pictures. I made work there for 12 years”

 

 

“I really enjoyed myself working on these images which comes across in the pictures, we had a lot of fun. I stopped making the work when New Labour came to power in 1997 and returned to the USA to do other things. It seemed like a natural end to the project”

 

 

‘Playing around in the street in summertime. This is Dawn, who worked as the manger of a KFC in Nottingham city centre’

 

 

“People presume the images were taken in a snapshot style but that was just the aesthetic I wanted. They were made using a very large landscape camera with a big flash rig. I repurposed everything to give the images the high quality and clarity I needed to print them large for galleries. I was interested in making documentary-type images to exhibit as art”

 

 

“This was the first family I photographed on the estate. Geoff the father got into breeding koi carp, hence the ponds, which were co-opted by the kids as a swimming pool. I can’t remember what we did with all the earth that we dug out to build the pools. There were always lots of schemes like this to make extra money”