‘It’s greed, that’s what it’s about’: documenting the UK’s cost of living crisis – photo essay
In 2023 I set out to document the UK’s cost of living crisis. I had a picture in my mind that what we were experiencing was the culmination of 13 years of Conservative governments. The work is titled The Magic Money Tree after Theresa May’s words on BBC Question Time: “There isn’t a magic money tree that suddenly delivers all the money everybody wants.”
I spent a month visiting the North Bristol food bank, talking to people, listening to their experiences and gathering stories. We decided not to photograph people using the food bank but to take their experiences and write them large across bus shelters and pavements on the high street.
Drawn to working-class communities like the one I grew up in, I made work focusing on Tipton in the Black Country, South Shields in the north-east and my own community in south Bristol. I photographed what I found there and collaborated with people I got to know. Compact film cameras were handed out and I taught photography workshops for children and young people.
Photo taken by children on compact film cameras that Mackay handed out in Bristol and Tipton.
All together, photographs, drawings, paintings, banners and testimony tell the collective story of the cost of living crisis. It’s protest art in an election year.
At a food bank, I met people who jumped at the opportunity to pick up a camera and be creative. An older woman showed me the drawings she made as a child, some on wallpaper because she didn’t have anything else. I posted her some charcoal and she started drawing again at the age of 74.
Leighanne Jackson, 38, in her kitchen in South Shields, July 2023. Leighanne has five children, all of whom have spent time in care. ‘I am someone who doesn’t give up and won’t be defeated,’ she says. While I am photographing Leighanne, she shows me a photo on her phone of her hugging her youngest son, the last time she saw him. He is now adopted. ‘I had nothing. I gave [him] up for adoption. If I had had support, I could have kept him.’
A woman in Bristol with terminal cancer spoke to me. She was a single parent having to visit the food bank to feed her family. I was shown paintings made by Dave, stored in a church hall, about his experience of being evicted and then homeless. There was the older lady in South Shields that could no longer afford her favourite red leicester cheese, parents struggling to buy baby formula, a 17-year-old campaigning for universal free school meals and a woman who had lived in a tent for two years.
Above: free hot lunches at the One for All drop-in centre at St Hilda’s church, South Shields. Top left: volunteers Eunice Hodgson, Tia Leonard and Leighanne Jackson serve up hot lunches. Top right: Andrew: ‘I’ve been going days without any food, without any milk or anything like that, teas, coffees, etc. It’s one big struggle. I don’t think the government are doing enough to address the cost of living crisis. For my future I would just like everything to be sorted out and enough to survive on.’
By the summer of 2023, I had found my collaborators. For a month I visited the North Bristol food bank. One of the questions I asked people was: “Does the UK still have an adequate safety net?” Hazel told me: “At a very basic level there probably is a safety net but only for people that either fight to get the attention themselves or people that have somebody that will draw it to somebody’s attention. So there is a safety net but it’s got great big holes in it.”
I asked people what they had had for dinner the night before coming to the food bank. “Nothing for three days,” “a can of tuna”, “toast”, “a bowl of cereal”, “nothing, I only cook for my son”.
Above: a mother and daughter walk along Owen Street in Tipton. Right: looking towards Upper Church Lane in Tipton. Far right: Nikki and her four children wait for a bus in Tipton. Below: Poppy at the shopping centre in Tipton.
By the end of the year I was asking: “To what extent is the UK a failed state?” Gareth told me: “I think the country is at breaking point. Especially with the NHS and mental health.” As I write this, even the IMF has advised the government to fund essential services over tax cuts this election year.
Biddick in South Shields.
To all the people who collaborated and shared their experiences, I am grateful. Mostly, I feel relieved to have made this work. If I were to try to make it this year, I’m not sure I would be able. I hear from colleagues that 2023 was the worst year for assignments. My personal finances have become increasingly precarious. My partner and I, both self-employed, are struggling with late payments as everyone struggles with increasing costs.
Michelle, 56, at home in Bristol, August 2023. ‘I can see it [the cost of living crisis] in the cupboards, hardly any food, no treats, no healthy eating. I like to eat from the ground. I like fresh produce. I just can’t do that these days. It’s just, it’s really, really hard. The freshest thing we can eat is potatoes. I came to the food bank three weeks ago. And I’ve come back again today because I’ve had to come back. I’ve just finished one job but I’m hoping to start another one in the next couple of weeks.’
It is said that politics is about choice. I witnessed the impact of choices made by our politicians on the lives of people across the country. For example, the choice not to raise Healthy Start vouchers so low-income families can afford baby milk and not be forced to water it down or steal it from the supermarket. Poverty, too, is a political choice.
The shelter of a Deliveroo rider in Victoria Park, Bristol, with apples and cereal bars placed on top by locals, April 2023.
Theresa May claimed there wasn’t magic money tree but in 2020 we saw the Bank of England use quantitative easing to print money to cover Rishi Sunak’s furlough scheme and the universal credit uplift. As a result, poverty decreased during the pandemic, momentarily. Over the past 14 years we have seen the money go further away from those most in need.
Top: Maria Spiteri, 74, out shopping with her grandsons Harvey and Chesney in Tipton, April 2023. ‘We’re only getting the same amount of money and then you have to meet the price of the food. We are being taken for granted. And you’re talking about greed, selfishness, and I don’t like it.’ Above left: Filwood, Bristol. Above right: Railway Street, Jarrow.
In his book Shattered Nation, Danny Dorling writes: “It is possible that in 2022 the UK became the most unequal country in Europe in terms of income inequality. Elsewhere on the continent, development in the opposite direction can be seen.”
A woman gives her spare change to a man rough sleeping on East Street in Bristol.
The Magic Money Tree tells a story we all know. My hope is that this work will provide more detail for some people. That all these experiences, seen side by side, paint a true picture of this time. I hope it’s a story that is about to change.
The Magic Money Tree was made with the support of an Arts Council England, National Lottery project grant. The work was commissioned by Bristol photo festival and Historic England. The Magic Money Tree exhibition will open at the New Art Gallery Walsall on 9 March, running until 14 July.