Portrait Of Britain

Coming at a pivotal time in UK politics, Portrait of Britain, the British Journal of Photography's annual photography exhibition, is back for 2019 and Hoxton Mini Press will once again be producing the accompanying publication. The winning photographs from this open-call competition are selected by a panel of expert judges and will be displayed on digital billboard screens nationwide at the same time as the book's launch where they are seen by over 10 million people. These captivating portraits celebrate the diversity, culture and identity of Britain at a critical time in its history.

Nearly all of us have to work, but how much do we really know about what other people do all day? What is it like to be a fishmonger, a sex worker or an Orthodox rabbi? Or a banker, a research scientist or a carer? How do our jobs affect our lives, beliefs and happiness? And what happens when we don't work? Joanna Biggs has travelled the country to find the answers, talking to interns and bosses, professionals and entrepreneurs, thinkers and doers. She takes us from Westminster to the Outer Hebrides, from a hospital in Wales to the industrial Midlands, introducing us to different worlds of work and the people who inhabit them. Rich with the voices of the wealthy and poor, native and immigrant, women and men of the UK in the twenty-first century, All Day Long shows us who we are through what we do.

"A national pantheon of the greatest names in British history and culture, the collections of the National Portrait Gallery contain more than 11,000 paintings, sculptures and works on paper and over a quarter of a million photographs. There are kings and queens, courtiers and courtesans, politicians and poets, soldiers and scientists, artists and writers, philosophers and film stars individuals from every sphere. This book presents a broad selection of the personalities that have shaped the last four centuries of British life, from Elizabeth I to David Beckham, from Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney, portrayed by artists as diverse as Hans Holbein, David Bailey, Joshua Reynolds and Paula Rego. Special features ... provide insights into particular areas of the Collection, and an introductory essay explains the history and purpose of this great public institution"--Publisher's description.

While extensive attention has been paid to black youth, adult black British men are a notable omission in academic literature. This book is the first attempt to understand one of Britain’s hidden populations: the post-Windrush generation, who matured within a post-industrial British society that rendered them both invisible and irrelevant. Using ethnography, participant observation, interviews and his own personal experience, and without an ounce of liberal angst, Kenny Monrose pulls no punches and presents the reader with a fierce but sensitive study of a population that has been vilified and ignored. The widely disseminated portrait of black maleness, which habitually constructs black men as being either violently dangerous, or social failures, is challenged by granting black men in Britain the autonomy to speak on sociologically significant issues candidly and openly for themselves. This reveals how this group has been forced to negotiate a glut of political shifts and socially imposed imperatives, ranging from Windrush to Brexit, and how these have had an impact on their life course. This provides a cultural uplift and offers an authenticated examination and privileged insight of black British culture. This book will be of interest to sociologists, cultural historians and criminologists engaged with citizenship, migration, race, racialisation and criminal justice.

There is a persistent myth about the British: that they are a nation of stoics, with stiff upper lips, repressed emotions, and inactive lachrymal glands. Weeping Britannia--the first history of crying in Britain--comprehensively debunks this myth. Far from being a persistent element in the national character, the notion of the British stiff upper lip was in fact the product of a relatively brief and militaristic period of the nation's past, from about 1870 to 1945. In earlier times we were a nation of proficient, sometimes virtuosic moral weepers. To illustrate this perhaps surprising fact, Thomas Dixon charts six centuries of weeping Britons, and theories about them, from the medieval mystic Margery Kempe in the early fifteenth century, to Paul Gascoigne's famous tears in the semi-finals of the 1990 World Cup. In between, the book includes the tears of some of the most influential figures in British history, from Oliver Cromwell to Margaret Thatcher (not forgetting George III, Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin, and Winston Churchill along the way). But the history of weeping in Britain is not simply one of famous tear-stained individuals. These tearful micro-histories all contribute to a bigger picture of changing emotional ideas and styles over the centuries, touching on many other fascinating areas of our history. For instance, the book also investigates the histories of painting, literature, theatre, music and the cinema to discover how and why people have been moved to tears by the arts, from the sentimental paintings and novels of the eighteenth century and the romantic music of the nineteenth, to Hollywood weepies, expressionist art, and pop music in the twentieth century. Weeping Britannia is simultaneously a museum of tears and a philosophical handbook, using history to shed new light on the changing nature of Britishness over time, as well as the ever-shifting ways in which Britons express and understand their emotional lives. The story that emerges is one in which a previously rich religious and cultural history of producing and interpreting tears was almost completely erased by the rise of a stoical and repressed British empire in the late nineteenth century. Those forgotten philosophies of tears and feeling can now be rediscovered. In the process, readers might perhaps come to view their own tears in a different light, as something more than mere emotional incontinence.

Compelling stories from 25 couples, families and individuals who have left the city (and still kept their work, their inspiration and their social lives) prove there are many benefits to life outside the M25 beyond simply more space and better air. Full of stunning photography, good advice, beautiful interiors and inspiring tales from a wide variety of people - single young professionals, retired couples, freelancers, office workers, renters and home-owners - this book may just tempt you to escape the capital s gravitational pull...

Remote working is here to stay. More people than ever before are finding it's not just possible to work from home but much more productive, affordable and - as this book will show you - inspiring. For of all the places to create a workspace in your home, the garden offers a unique opportunity for architects to innovate. From visually arresting structures that transform the experience of working to plant-covered studios built in harmony with nature, the exquisite photography and informative text will show you just what can be built in a backyard. Why commute to an office when you can Work from Shed?