Britain is divided, by twelve regions, a statistical arrangement designed to help governments see the life of the population in graphs, charts and tables. I’m looking at Britain through these regions too, but not statistically, not through numbers that ignore the brilliant details of everyday life, but through the lens of my camera, on the ground, up close.

Wales

From a pedestrian bridge connecting two car parks I see the standout feature of Swansea’s skyline: “MORE POETRY IS NEEDED,” painted white on a huge black wall. I close my eyes and think of Doncaster, the first town I visited on this journey around modern urban Britain, where shoppers are welcomed to the Frenchgate Centre by a strikingly similar statement: “WE NEED MORE POETRY IN OUR LIVES.”

I consider the overlaps between these two locally organised, non-profit art projects that connect – unintentionally – such far away places: both loom over places of commerce (a shopping centre, a shopping car park), vying for the attention of consumers in search of what they think they need to buy; both highlight a contemporary crisis of the human experience in British towns and cities, pointing out that we desperately require, but are worryingly lacking, in poetry; and both, like a scream to the streets, are trying to be heard above the monotonous drone of commerciality, and in so doing remind us of what would make our lives richer, of what might save us, of what could fill the deficit. I walk around the city for a while, through a pop-up Christmas fair, past a gigantic plastic snowflake in the centre, alongside prison walls with signs prohibiting drones, across the brown sand in the bay, and then I fancy skipping town.

I take the bus eastward to Port Talbot, having been impressed by the look of it on yesterday’s drive into Swansea. I arrive and immediately head in the direction of the town’s steelworks, its chimneys and tall mechanical structures silhouetting in the early sunset. It dominates the horizon, steam and smoke turning purple and black, looking like a permanent feature of the coastal landscape.

The pavement runs out, but I keep on walking, towards the factory, now by the side of the motorway, going against the grain of the M4 corridor, the grass littered with rubbish slung from the windows of a million passing cars. And then I reach a point of equidistance and stop, caught between the hills behind and the factory ahead, between nature and artifice, between God and man, each telling their stories, tales of a pre-industrial and industrial Wales, of agriculture and mining, of plant and metal, of ploughs and the furnace. I don’t go any further. It’s dark and I’ve gone far enough.

I’m on Queen Street in Cardiff on Black Friday. People are buying disposable Christmas tat – wrapping paper, tinsel, baubles, crackers – probably made in factories in China. Most of it will end up in landfill or in the oceans. Some people are lying on the street, others are propped up against walls and shop windows. People are begging under cash machines. A charity stall seeks donations for dogs. Lovers walk hand in hand. Children are carried by adults. There are tents pitched on concrete. A fake log cabin hosts drinkers of mulled wine. Smoke and vape drift. The Christmas soundtrack is on repeat. This is a postcard from Black Friday Britain, kaleidoscopic and confused, disorientating, in flux.

Britain before Brexit: Wales Show all 16 1 /16 Britain before Brexit: Wales Britain before Brexit: Wales Swansea A giant anonymous message calls after a shopper leaving the town centre, his bags full with advent calendars and Christmas wrapping paper, reminding him of the non-material he’s lacking. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Wrexham Two notices occupy the same wall, both white, both prohibitive. Yet the distance between them goes further than the grey bricks: they are separated by political and everyday concerns, by enmity and what’s simply not allowed. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Cardiff Another tent pitched in a British town centre, adding to those I saw in Coventry and Margate and Great Yarmouth and elsewhere. It looks so out of place, so unadapted, and I can almost hear the bitter scrape of a tent peg on concrete, unable to penetrate, unable to settle in and secure. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Swansea It’s jarring to see the sanitised whiteness of the hospital on the high street. Its clinical, no frills description is at odds with the puns and the slogans of big-name brands. Yet it’s more mysterious too: the crucial details are absent, only its origin is laid bare as a clue. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Merthyr Tydfil The site of the former police station, now demolished, the ground bare behind bars. The sign hangs like an historical artefact, revealing not only what once was, but how the public and the law were divided. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Aberystwyth Thank you notes to God are displayed in St. Michael’s Church. I’m interested in how people interpret His role in their lives and how they express gratitude. I try to ignore innuendo when I see this note, and consider the vague completeness of God’s contribution. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Port Talbot A view of the Tata Steelworks from an underpass by the M4. It flanks the southern side of the motorway, facing the hills to the north and the town between and below. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Swansea A disused road sign, first in Welsh, then in English, propped up against a tanning shop. The surface of the body designed to sell the product has been satirised with graffiti in Arabic: “Oh, fire of my heart!” I read the message as a subversive play on heat and attraction in our society, counterposing the superficial, sexualised burning of the body’s exterior (tanning) with the purer, warmer image of the interior fire of love. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Aberystwyth The university Geography Society beats the History Society in a drinking competition. Participants turn glasses over above their heads to prove that they’re empty. Student supporters cheer from the balconies in drunken delirium. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Port Talbot A distinctly twenty-first-century British hieroglyphic. A symbol conveying an obsession with virility, with its tendency to tarnish and spoil, to reduce everything it touches to an insignificant canvas for its power. I would say it has something to do with Port Talbot’s phallic steelworks and their daily emission, if I hadn’t seen it so much elsewhere in Britain. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Merthyr Tydfil Children imagine the future of the town, and in so doing transform the present, from something static and fixed to a place of becoming, where “now” is simply a transitional phase, pregnant with the utopian possibilities of “Las Tydfil”, a place combining two of Britain’s strongest currents: environmentalism and gambling. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Cardiff The Welsh Dragon is printed on plastic bags probably because the company thinks it can sell more products by tapping into the country’s niche patriotism. Yet, it also means that the Welsh Dragon is being treated as rubbish, thrown to the gutter, trashed in landfill, left as litter in a mess of detritus. Richard Morgan Britain before Brexit: Wales Cardiff Black Friday on Queen Street. The street is lined with commercial exclamations - of sales and deals and time running out - that sometimes appear better as ironic parodies of the fate of the capital’s rough sleepers than notices of the products and bargains they promote. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Swansea An anarchist imperative opposite the prison wall, suggesting to the residential area that fundamental, wholesale social change cannot come about through participating in the democratic political process, but only by rejecting it, confronting it, and rising against it. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Merthyr Tydfil Investment cut in half. The promise of a sale broken. Once an announcement, now discarded to the street, visible only to those looking down, more meaningful now than ever before, in the company of rotting autumn. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Wrexham The town has a similar accent to the Liverpudlian one. There are hints that it shares an undercurrent of resentment towards The Sun newspaper too. Richard Morgan/The Independent

I don’t know why – I’m not taking pictures – but I am accosted in Wrexham. A man slams into my shoulder and says “watch where the f*** you’re going” in what sounds to me like a Liverpudlian accent. When a witness tells me in the same accent not to take it personally, that the guy’s a drunk and has had a lot of kickings lately, I wonder what’s going on, what’s happened to the Welsh accent. Later in the Bowling Green, keeping an eye on the development of a dominoes grudge match, I’m told by a home team player that there is, in fact, a similarity between the two accents, and it might be due to the large number of children evacuated from Liverpool to Wrexham during WWII, creating influences that stuck, leaving traces still audible. I’m not convinced, but in any case I stick around to watch the dominoes unfold, a game matching beginnings with ends and ends with beginnings in one long unbroken sequence. I think about the Wrexham accent and promise myself never to talk of “the Welsh accent” ever again. Generalise Britain at your peril, I note.

I learn from a Second World War memorial by the ruins of Aberystwyth Castle that “a man hath no greater love” than that for his country. It’s funny, because I could swear I’ve loved human beings far more than I could ever love England or Britain. And what does a country consist of anyway, if not its people? To be honest, I’m falling in love with Aberystwyth Bay right now, eating curry and chips in the twilight. After dinner I skim stones into the sea, take the bus to the Arts Centre, cry my eyes out watching Bohemian Rhapsody, and walk back into the drunk student buzz of the town centre.

In a nightclub I witness GEOGSOC (Geography society) destroy HISTSOC (History society) in a drinking competition. The rafters are lined with Hogwarts wannabes cheering on the pint-downing gladiators below, and in the competitive tribalism and youthful loyalty I do notice a resemblance to the Harry Potter vibe, only with a bucket load of beer and vodka thrown into the mix. Indeed, shots of vodka are going for 60p in this place, because it’s Vodka Tuesday. A couple of locals in the corner describe a love-hate relationship with the town’s student population: “They do bring a lot of trade and vibrancy to the place, but last week after Vodka Tuesday the gutters were lined with vomit.”

Merthyr Tydfil makes sense when seen from Cyfarthfa Castle, standing on a hillside on the edge of the town. It was from there for most of the 19th century that the Crawshay family, industrial capitalists from Yorkshire, living like kings in lavish extravagance, liked to watch their profits grow in the ironworks below, in the rows of shanty terraces, in the overcrowding and crime, in the poverty and hunger, in the epidemics and filth and death of the valley.