This was taken in 1981 at a Berni Inn steakhouse in Harrow, London. I think it’s a Beefeater now. These people had just walked in out of the rain. They were a bit wary of me, but stood there for a few seconds and I was able to grab one frame before they disappeared. It was for the magazine New Society, founded in the early 1960s to document society in ways understandable to general readers, avoiding jargon – a mirror of its stablemate, New Scientist. The art editors had almost complete freedom to commission and choose pictures.
The brief was to find the lower middle class, to accompany an article about this growing demographic. But the problem was that nobody wanted to admit to being lower middle class. There was no pride in it, like there was in being working class. People just looked baffled when I approached them, so I started to gloss over that part and simply said I was shooting for a magazine feature about how people lived in north London.
