The first career-spanning volume by one of the most significant documentary photographers in Britain. Made across the country over three decades, in the years before and after Margaret Thatcher's time in government, it catches seemingly small moments of everyday life that tell a far bigger story.

Abrahams became a photographer after working for the ambulance service in Liverpool: entering some of the last occupied houses in condemned streets proved a revelation, and he went back with a camera. Some of those first pictures are here. Asked once why he works in black and white, he answered: “I grew up in Liverpool in the 1950s and 60s, a city in which to my eyes colour was absent.”