Melanie and the Miners’ Strike: the joy of Leeds nights out in the 1980s

Home to Leeds for the Christmas holidays, Victoria Gill was clearing through some of her old belongings when she came across two old boxes of photos under the bed. Going through them, she found they had all been taken around 1984, in the depths of the Miners’ Strike and the Thatcher Years – and the year her mum turned 18.

Picture after picture shows Gill’s mum, Melanie, on normal nights out with her close circle of friends. Seeing she had found something special, Gill took them all to publisher Idea, which kept the title from their first exchange of emails, Melanie & the Miners’ Strike.

The book has nothing, and everything, to do with the miner’s strike. ‘This is one snapshot, that was captured despite of [it],’ says Gill. ‘We know parts of the north have never recovered from the Thatcher years. My mum and her friends happened to turn 18 that year. It is especially important to me that these pictures were taken outside of the lens of going to university or art school. That they were taken by my mum and her friends on their average weekends.’

Going through the photos, Gill enjoyed rediscovering her mum’s powerful friendships. ‘I already had a firm undercurrent of how important my mum's mates are to her. We are very close and she is still best friends with Jane, who features heavily in the book; there is not a Sunday where Jane is not round at the house. I also had tiny snippets of information from what my mum had written on the back of some of the photographs, like “Annette’s, ear – morning after, Jan 1985”.’

Throughout, there are snippets of conversations between Gill, her mum and friends Jane, Rebecca and Annette. Highlights include, from Jane: ‘We still went out when we were pregnant – that’s what you did. There was none of this folic acid.’ Perhaps unnecessarily from Melanie, accompanying a photo of her surrounded by cards, tinsel and shiny baubles: ‘I bloody loved Christmas.’

Gill adds: ‘Finding my mum's old friends, who may have changed their names since getting married, was the real highlight. Introducing myself with, “Did you go out in the mid-1980s and [do you] remember Melanie – well, I am their daughter, can I ask you about this time?”, I was nervous, I was ready to be greeted with resistance, but instead I was met with some real excitement about seeing value in these images and many stories.’

Melanie & the Miner's Strike is published on 15 May by IDEA, ideanow.online/minersstrike