#kings

KIng's Lynn Mart 2012

©Si Barber Moral Rights Asserted

"The man who wrote Thomas The Tank Engine was from around here". Emneth, Norfolk.

Prospective customers reading the closure notice of the Labas Minimarket in King's Lynn. The shop, which sold goods catering to the Eastern European population of the town was found to be selling vapes of illegal strength, illicit tobacco and alcohol, with some sales being made to children.

Kings Lynn Mart 2013

On the Waltzers at the Mart, King's Lynn.

Si Barber

After his resignation as prime minister in September 2022, Boris Johnson's portrait is removed from the wall and Winston Churchill resumes his place of prominence at King's Lynn Conservative Club, Norfolk.

A room (kolhata) to rent advertisement in a newsagents window. The text is in Russian cyrillic and deliberately designed to appeal to prospective East European migrants tenants of a certain age. Anyone who went to school within the USSR before its collapse 1991 learned Russian as part of the curriculum, and as part of the Soviet cultural domination of its occupied territories. Although widely loathed and abandoned after the fall of communism, the practise of having a common language proved useful for migrants when those countries joined the EU under the A8 accession rules in 2004 and they were given the right to come to live and work in the UK. That meant Czechs, Latvians, Lithuanians, Slovakians, Slovenians, Poles, Hungarians and Estonians could communicate with each other. Useful if you’re trying to make yourself heard on a factory floor or field in the Fens. Even today If you go into any of the East European shops in the town the transaction will often complete with the assistant exclaiming “spasiba”, the Russian word for thanks.