Merlin Daleman’s stark portrait of time-trapped Britain

One day when Merlin Daleman was travelling around the UK taking photographs of what he calls the ​“economic north”, he met a man. His new acquaintance was in his late 40s, and the pair spent a good six hours together chatting and hanging out. He even offered Daleman a cup of tea and a Mr Kipling Cherry Bakewell tart, before revealing almost nonchalantly, that his life was about to be turned upside down.

“Oh yeah, and tomorrow, I’m being evicted,” he told Daleman.

“Dude, where are you going?” the photographer asked.

“I don’t know, I’m probably going to sleep in the park because it’s quiet there,” the man replied.

The news saddened Daleman but didn’t shock him. ​“He was basically saying that he was going to disappear, because that was the safest option for him,” the photographer recalls. ​“Sadly, it’s such a typical story – a nice guy who struggles mentally, then financially and with housing – I’ve heard it quite a few times, but now this story has got a name.”

• Read next: How Britain became a shattered nation

That encounter took place as Daleman was out creating his long-term project, which has now been published as his debut photobook Mutiny. Taken across the course of seven years, it explores the fractures along the UK’s economic and social fault lines, and ultimately the country’s growing political divisions in the face of widening inequality.

Having grown up across The Netherlands and Birmingham in England, like many others in the UK, Daleman was shocked when the result for the 2016 Brexit referendum came in. ​“I was really surprised that the vote went the way it went,” he recalls. ​“I was like: ​‘What’s going on? Have I missed something?’ I was curious to know who these people were and why they wanted to leave.”

He began diving into maps and statistics, and found a pattern straight away. ​“It soon became clear to me that it was not London, not the biggest cities, but the economic north that voted to leave,” he explains. ​“So that sparked my interest. I thought: ​‘Well, I’ve never taken pictures in my own backyard,’ so I decided to take up the challenge and start taking pictures here.”

So where exactly is the economic north? The answer, according to Daleman, is pretty simple. ​“According to statistics, London and its hinterland is not the economic north – and the rest of the UK is,” he says. ​“It’s not a geographical line; it’s a social economic line. If you go northeast of London to Essex, it’s already the economic north.”

• Read next: In photos: 35 years of British working class photography

Across several trips while working for daily Dutch newspapers, Daleman visited dozens of smaller towns and villages around the UK, from Northern Ireland to Wales, Glasgow to Grimsby, discovering places where time seemed to stand still. Whereas smaller towns in The Netherlands saw development, with shiny new buildings springing from the ground, coupled with infrastructure upgrades, these British equivalents saw no such investment.

“It was the same cracked pavements, the same paint coming off the walls and the same things not being repaired,” he says. ​“When you go to the centre of London, it isn’t like that – things are more taken care of, so it seems like the governmental policies have a better effect over London than in Sunderland.”

The photographs in Mutiny capture this phenomenon. Filled with imagery illustrating economic hardship, from empty funfairs to rows of shuttered and abandoned buildings, the book is also filled with moments of Martin Parr-esque surreality and absurdism – one shot a family dressed in pink, riding a pastel pink coloured boat along the side of a tall, stark security fence guarding Skegness Pleasure Beach. 

It all goes to highlight the absurd paradox that is the UK’s economic and political climate. Despite being the fourth richest country in the world according to Forbes, how can there be such widespread poverty? And why has there been a creeping rise in right-wing nationalism, which caused in-part the 2016 Brexit vote, and has only accelerated a near-decade later as Nigel Farage’s Reform Party threatens to upend the political status quo? In Daleman’s Mutiny, the answers are clear to see.

Mutiny by Merlin Daleman is published by GOST Books.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s digital editor. Follow him on Bluesky.

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