Splintered Isle: A Journey Through Brexit Britain
As Britain heads for an election, a Times reporter and a photoghrapher, spent two weeks driving from London to Glasgow. They found a country united only by its disunity.
Text By Patrick Kingsley, Photographs by Laetitia Vançon.
SHIREBROOK, England — There used to be a mine at the edge of this small town near the center of England. Now there is only a warehouse.
The mine provided coal that powered the country. The warehouse stores tracksuits. The mine meant a job for life. The warehouse offers mostly temporary work for the lowest legal wage. You work here, one worker told me in the drizzly parking lot last month, and you get treated like a monkey. Shirebrook was the third stop of a 900-mile journey I made through Britain last month. I was trying to make sense of a splintered country in the run-up to the Dec. 12 general election. The outside world typically sees Britain through the affluence and cosmopolitanism of London, but other than one quick stop there, I went elsewhere, looking for people beyond the capital’s glare.
