English Worker Co-operative Movement 1980s – Photobook

From 1981-89 I was heavily involved in promoting, facilitating, developing and working in worker co-ops. At points during that period I was commissioned to do research on this emerging movement and its support agencies, by the Greater London Enterprise Board (GLEB),  and the Open University Co-ops Research Unit, as well as being employed from 1986 by the Oxfordshire Co-operative Development Agency.

Some of the time I had the sense to carry a camera with me to record these initiatives and experiments. Most of the pictures have a ‘snatched’ journalistic quality to them rather than something posed and composed – the pressures of the ‘day job’.

But the photographs give a sense of  the dedication, commitment and fun that these experiments in new ways of organizing working relations and re-framing the nature of work provided.

As part of their ongoing project to capture black and white documentary photography from that period Cafe Royal Books published a photo book of them in October 2021.