Mark McEvoy’s tube photographs, taken in London Underground carriages at around 11pm on Friday and Saturday nights from 1992 to 1995, capture moments that may seem superficially frivolous, but might be the most significant of our lives. These are the golden hours of the end of the week, where friendships are found and sealed; gabbled conversation rolls along with the sway of the carriages; and new lovers meet up en route for an encounter that may turn out to be a fleeting one-off, or in fact the beginnings of a lifelong companionship. All are swept along in the scramble to hop onboard the last tube – a panic that ended when all-night services began on some lines 10 years ago this month.
The night tube arrived when my time of going out all weekend was fading, and gave me a slight feeling of missing out. Looking at photos of other people’s social lives can make one feel like that too; at the same time, it’s not hard to see ourselves in these tired, happy and thoughtful faces. These images feel so natural in part because McEvoy was not a voyeur but a participant in London’s mid-90s nightlife.
Living in a shared flat in Camden Town, north London, he was part of the capital’s music scene, describing himself as “slightly hippy-ish, trendy, kind of casual, into funk, jazz and reggae”; he “smoked a lot of weed”. One night, travelling home from Brixton, he was struck by being surrounded by a very London mixture of people of different ages, races, sexualities and pop-cultural scenes – the tube carriage became a beautiful stage. Most of the pictures were taken after McEvoy had asked his subjects for permission, and he found that usually they’d pose for a shot, then just carry on doing what they were doing before.
The images are rooted in their time by the old wooden-floored rolling stock and tube seat patterns, and by the fashions of London’s subcultures: casuals, rockabillies, goths, and punks doing the punk thing and responding to requests for a photo by baring their arses. McEvoy documented the last years of the fiercely tribal nature of British youth culture before it was flattened out by the internet, as streaming homogenised music tastes. The lack of smartphones in these photos is striking.
Yet the energy in them feels curiously universal, expressive of a particularly British shedding of reserve and the joy of closing time and just before, when a good night brings up the feeling that there’s always the potential for something more. Even today, with gen Z drinking far less than their predecessors, you still see similar scenes on the underground, although at 4am the train rattles along more quietly, carrying more wreckage. The life in the faces that McEvoy snapped three decades ago endures in a new generation, and even in those of us who are old enough to know better but still sometimes find ourselves rushing for the night tube.
It’s the eternal energy of London, written on skin and flesh; rage and laughter, smiles and tears. (Main picture, above) “This couple were nuzzling up to each other, and when I asked if I could take a picture, they said yes straight away and started kissing. It was kind of a performance, but then it wasn’t. They thought: oh, this guy’s asked to take a picture; come on, let’s give him this.
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