Just arrived in the post from Cafe Royal Books, Working Men: Club and Coal is a simply-presented A5 booklet featuring the work of Homer Sykes. It’s nicely printed, and cheap – £5! – but doesn’t have any text to explain when and where the series was shot. This seems a bit of a shame, though doing some research on the web to work it out has led me towards some interesting photography that I’d no seen before. Maybe it’s not a bad thing to be made to do some of the work yourself.

The images themselves are excellent: black & white, unposed shots from collieries and workingmen’s clubs, depicting a part of British that’s a part of many people’s past, or maybe part of an inherited memory, but now looks like ancient history.