Thatcher’s Children was born out of a series first made in 1992 focusing on two parents and six children living in a hostel for homeless families in Blackpool, England. The project was made in response to a speech by Peter Lilley, then Secretary of State for Social Security, in which he announced his determination to ‘close down the something-for-nothing society.’ French newspaper Libération dispatched a journalist to northern England to find out what this society looked like, and Easton was commissioned to take the accompanying photographs. His resulting monochrome images of the overcrowded two-bedroom council flat in Blackpool sparked a reaction by both the public and the press. His images attached human faces and nuanced realities to a group of people casually maligned by politicians and media as an ‘underclass of scroungers.’
Thatcher’s Children, a long-term project by photographer Craig Easton, examines the intergenerational nature of poverty as experienced by three generations of the Williams family in the north of England. The passage of time shown in the book demonstrates how deprivation is connected to the social policy failures of successive governments.
