On a night out with the cast of Skins, Ewen Spencer captured millennial hedonism in all its unabated, messy glory

One evening in 2006, Ewen Spencer travelled up from his hometown of Brighton to Watford, northwest of London. He had been commissioned by Channel 4 to take promotional pictures for an upcoming teen drama, Skins, but didn’t have much of an idea of what to expect. 

“I didn’t know anything about Skins, no one did – I knew it was a production in Bristol,” Spencer recalls. ​“I got sent a DVD with a pilot on it and watched about 10 minutes of it. I was about 34 at the time, so it wasn’t for me.”

At the time, Spencer had established himself as a key documentarian of British youth culture, having published his canonical photobook Open Mic the previous year, documenting the earliest days of grime, while also shooting the sleeve images for The Streets’ legendary second LP Original Pirate Material.

• Read next: ​“A party is a microcosm of a nation”: Caleb Femi on the decline of the house party

The plan for evening was to turn a nondescript suburban home into a hedonistic house party. With its now famous cast members standing on the edge of stardom – Nicolas Hoult, Dev Patel, April Pearson, Hannah Murray, Daniel Kaluuya, Mike Bailey, Larissa Wilson and others – mingling alongside a host of extras, it was part curated photoshoot, part debauched night out.

“We turned up, and all hell broke loose,” he says. ​“There were 10 to 12 main cast characters from the show that me and my assistant were working with quite closely, and the remainder were extras who were all students from [arts college] Central Saint Martins. They were all around London’s parties and nightlife at the time, so it was a sort of rent-a-rave – they were fantastic and had a wonderful energy.”

Pictures that Spencer took that night are now revisited in his new photobook One Night in Watford. With gun fingers raised in the air, outfits pulled from the noughties heyday of Topshop and Topman, and even intimate scenes of cast members lying on a bed, the book presents the full emotional range of a night out, from its peak time madness to its tender afterhours. Storylines that play out in the series are hinted towards, while never been seen before cuttings are also included across the book’s spreads.

• Read next: Hardcore soul: photos of big nights out in ​’90s Britain

With its open portrayal of coming-of-age drug taking and sex, as well as tackling of more complex issues such as eating disorders and mental health, Skins became a cultural phenomenon overnight, its success and visibility driven in part by Spencer’s photography. ​“I was really pleased to see the pictures all over the UK on massive billboards,” he says. ​“My son is 27, his generation watched Skins, and my daughter who is now 19, her generation watched it, and I think follow generations will also take heed too, because it just discusses British youth culture, doesn’t it?”

But now nearly two decades after it first aired, among the glowsticks and Y2K sunglasses, the pictures capture a different era for young people and partying culture in general. Four years before the creation of Instagram, and a year before the introduction for the first-generation iPhone, there’s a nostalgia to the images that hark back to an era before ​‘Get ready with me’ videos and post-event photo dumps.

“I think everyone’s too self-conscious and too self-aware nowadays – they’re in pain but they aren’t dealing with it,” Spencer says. ​“It’s tough being young, and it was tough for the kids who were in the garage pictures from the ​’90s, tough for the kids in the grime scene, and tough for the kids in Skins. But nowadays people are very precious, and everything’s published in their lives, where before it wasn’t.

“It was unusual to have anything in your life published and discussed, and now everything’s published and discussed, and people are walking around as if anyone gives a shit,” he continues. ​“And really the point is no one gives a fuck.”

One Night in Watford by Ewen Spencer is published by Friend Editions.

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

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