#workers

G's celery harvest, Cambridgeshire.

Workers at G’s Vegetables in Cambridgeshire, UK reaping the 2019 celery harvest.

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Antek, Denisa and Vendula, seasonal workers from the Czech Republic hoeing weeds in the brassica fields of South Lincolnshire. Weeding, needing the application of the eye to determine between the crop and invasive plants is one of the few agricultural tasks that has yet to be mechanised or automated.

Migrants in Wisbech Cambridgeshire.

migrant workers seeking work in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire.

New Roots, Old Soil - Fenland Lives In Transition

Farm workers harvesting cabbages during a rain storm near Sibsey, Lincolnshire. Leafy vegetables like cabbages, kale and cauliflower are pulled in the early winter when the first frosts come. Known as the Brassica season, much of the working day is spent in the wet and cold.

Iasmina, Horatiu and Luminata, factory workers from Romania, shopping after finishing work on Saturday afternoon.

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?Si Barber/07739 472 922 Field worker's accomodation in Lincolnshire.

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©Si Barber/07739 472 922 Field worker's accomodation in Lincolnshire.

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.

New Roots, Old Soil

A hairbrush, a broken mirror, a plate.

An abandoned pigsty inhabited by two Latvian women who came to the UK seeking work but found themselves homeless and eating dog food to survive. Wisbech, Cambridgeshire.

Early morning Shift change at Fleet Hargate, Lincolnshire.

New Roots, Old Soil

Migrant workers from Eastern Europe shopping in Boston town centre on a Saturday afternoon.They’ve adopted the ‘gopnik’ look, popular amongst fans of 'blatnaya pesnya' - literally 'criminal’s songs’, a genre of music popularised by East European hip-hop artists but with its roots in 19th Century czarist Russia.