I was born and raised in Sheffield, an English city where the recent referendum reflected the nation: a narrow 51 percent majority voted for Britain to leave the European Union. It’s emblematic of Britain in other ways, too. Part of the city is leafy, educated, liberal and dynamic. That is not where I’m from. I was raised in the hinterlands, where only 9 percent of the population holds university degrees and 81 percent of the inhabitants voted to leave the E.U.

Over the last 10 years, I’ve been documenting my home, and it is only now that I realize what the photographs represent: white, working-class landscapes that have remained politically invisible for too long.

At school it was as though we had been deliberately miseducated to become underlings, set on a conveyor belt churning out factory workers, and the only work experience I was ever assigned, when I was 14, was two months in a retail store warehouse.

After quitting college — “You don’t have a cat-in-hell’s chance of passing this course, John” were the verbatim words of my biology tutor — I spent a couple of years “dossing around,” working a dead-end, part-time job as a stockroom assistant in a department store. I was lost, low on confidence and, to quote Paul Theroux — who noticed similar traits in the 1980s among Belfast’s youth — “dying of indifference.”

Photo

When you’re a dosser, especially one with no money, you inhabit strange spaces, times and atmospheres; the quiet of a midweek afternoon is your desolate playground, and what else was there to do but wake up late, watch “Murder, She Wrote” reruns on daytime TV and go for long walks?

These strolls were often sluggish and guilt-ridden, whole days spent wandering foggy-eyed and groggy-minded. Sometimes I browsed the local pawnshop, the type you find in poor neighborhoods, filled with the backwash of broken dreams: musical instruments, how-to books, travel narratives, ab-rollers and cameras. There was a Nikon film SLR, and I bought it out of laziness.

That was another symptom of my predicament; I was broke but bored, so whenever I had a bit of money I’d spend it on something stupid that embodied the idea of escape. One week it was an Akai MPC, when I imagined I was going to be a music producer. The next it was graphic imaging software, as if I were going to be a designer. But I’d been trained by school to think of these things as being a million miles from what I might reasonably expect as a career, so I never pursued them with any real hope.

Photo

Perhaps it was an anticipatory allegory of Britain’s working-class “Brexit” vote: “We’re bored, invisible, jilted, what have we got to lose? Let’s do something and see what happens.”

Most of these objects gathered dust, sold a month or two later for much less than I paid. But the camera stuck, because it gave a bit of structure and meaning to my day, and the developed film was evidence that I existed. People like me were nowhere to be seen on television or in travel guides, in the usual images Britain exported to the rest of the world.

Photo

While I want to make it very clear that it is easier to be a white person in Britain than it is to be black, in my case I feel my blackness saved me. My Dad was an African American musician and actor, so my life in Sheffield was pierced with memories of being a younger child exposed to some travel, art and culture. Hip-hop and the words of Malcolm X stirred me into movement, and I reimagined my struggle as The Struggle, with obvious issues that I had to navigate, that could explain my pain. And as somebody with brown skin, I wasn’t able to reach the same easy (if ignorant) conclusions about my crummy life that my white friends could.

There was no comfort for me in simplifying British identity. It could never be us and them because, as a black Briton, I was both at the same time, so didn’t have the same crushing sense of entitlement my white friends had, nor the urge to blame other cultures for what was really the result of corporate exploitation and government cynicism about immigration.

I now live in London, where I’ve worked as a writer, photographer and broadcaster for 10 years, but it is the lost period of my life that continually haunts my work. Over the last decade, in between various projects and commissions, I’ve returned to my corner of Sheffield, which remains as neglected as ever.

But now I have the confidence to call myself a flâneur, rather than a dosser. After all, what did a young Henri Cartier-Bresson do in the 1930s — or William Eggleston in the 1970s — but idly wander the streets without an itinerary, taking photographs when it struck him?

Photo

These are lost landscapes largely populated by a demonized people who have found a voice in all of this Brexit chaos. When did you last see places like Sheffield, Sunderland or Romford mentioned in England’s national narrative? The warning signs were always there, but nobody was looking.

Although it may have been the wrong decision for all of us, it is largely a frustrated, vengeful, white, working-class Britain that has been ignored for too long, finally being shaken from its indifferent slumber.

Follow @johnypitts and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Johny Pitts is also on Instagram. You can also find Lens on Facebook and Instagram.