The British intimacy of ‘the afters’

Everyone knows the three phases of a good night out: First, there are the pres – the cheap booze downed to tinny music from a phone speaker. Then, the main event. And finally – for the real ones – come the afters. The lights flicker on, the club doors swing open, and the strangers you’ve just shared hours in a sweaty moshpit with file out like moths to the light of the nearest kebab shop. 

There’s a camaraderie in these hours, a shared unraveling. Makeup smudged, tights freshly laddered, voices hoarse from singing too loud. Maybe the sky is starting to pale and the first signs of the next day are starting to stir – but for those still riding the last waves of the last night, time becomes no object. As 54-year-old photographer Mischa Haller puts it, it feels like ​“it will go on forever”.

These are the moments the Swiss-born photographer tries to capture in his new photobook, Not Going Home. Over the course of three months in 1998, Haller travelled across UK cities – from Brighton to Edinburgh – capturing British youth in this post-club haze. ​“I went to bed early so that I was fresh, and started shooting at 4:30 in the morning,” he explains. Bleary-eyed from bed, Haller would pick out ​“good groups” as they emerged from clubs and ask to follow them around, recording the hours spent on beaches, cafes and slumped against road curbs as the sun began to rise.

The then 27-year-old had been photographing club-goers for years prior, formerly working as a club photographer in Paris before moving to London in the mid-’90s. It was during his time shooting for women’s magazine Minx (what he calls a female version of Loaded) in the capital, when he noticed just how revered ​“afters” culture is to the British; this was a phenomenon, he observed, that was built into the city’s day-to-day functioning. ​“What is amazing is all the infrastructure here, and not just in London, but also in the other cities,” Haller says. ​“You can get out of a club at 5 am, and there will be some greasy spoon open that actually serves you breakfast!” Post-club feasting features heavily in Haller’s photos – in some, twenty-somethings are surrounded by polystyrene boxes or plates of chips – in others they’re lingering under McDonald’s doorframes or grinning in anticipation through kebab shop windows.

• Read next: As Tbilisi’s famed nightclubs reawaken, a murky future awaits

The British reverence for afters goes deeper, though: There’s a feeling of transgression to staying up into the early hours – a past-your-bedtime defiance that offsets the rigid social customs often ascribed to British culture. ​“I think there’s the desire for the night not to end because you’re having such a great time for five, six hours and you want to go on forever,” says Haller. ​“But also, when you let go in Britain then you really let go, because it’s a very reserved culture during the day or the week, but then on the weekend the gloves are off and anything is possible.”

It’s a feeling that clearly resonates with people today: Since the photobook was published by the British Culture Archive earlier this year, it has sold out its first and now second editions. ​“I thought it would take us a year to sell a thousand books. It took us three days. It’s crazy,” says Haller. ​“I think they struck a nerve because people are almost looking for something real and analogue, because we’re going down into this AI digital tech world and as a counter-product of that we’re looking more and more for something that we can actually feel and touch and be part of and that makes us feel human again.”

The photos are all taken on slide film, a method – Haller explains excitedly – that produces positive (rather than negative) images that can be directly projected using a slide projector. The results capture the grungy authenticity of a time before the digital age – away from the glossy sheen of the main event you’d now see plastered over Instagram stories, and glimpses into moments where people were thinking of nothing but the time they were in. ​“We’re now being inundated by fake photos and fake video and we want to have a real experience, and this book is about the realest of experiences you can get: staying up all night on drugs or on alcohol and having a blast and never wanting it to end,” Haller says. 

There’s no question the world looks entirely different now, but Haller reckons the pull of the early hours is universal. ​“It’s the two-worlds-collide moment, where the street sweepers who are up and working collide with the ravers, the clubbers,” he says. ​“I just love that time of the day, I always think the light is so amazing and just the quietness. You feel like it’s full of possibilities”.

Not Going Home by Mischa Haller is published by the British Culture Archive.

Ella Glossop is Huck’s social lead. Follow her on Bluesky.

Buy your copy of Huck 81 here.

Enjoyed this article? Follow Huck on Instagram and sign up to our newsletter for more from the cutting edge of sport, music and counterculture.

Support stories like this by becoming a member of Club Huck.