:: BIRMINGHAM behind the scenes :: An insight into Birmingham’s invisible army of night workers

We’ve since been back to the markets, but this time we’ve focussed on the places that serve as a meeting place for those clocking off in the early hours of the morning. You might take your post-work pint for granted when work finishes at 5pm, but without the relentless dedication of the owners of these local cafés many night workers would have no place at all to grab a cuppa, have a bite to eat and chat with colleagues. The experience of working such anti-social hours seems to make the world into a sort of timeshare arrangement, where those that work nights get to experience their surroundings completely separately from those that live by a more typical timetable. This shared experience seems to create an odd sort of camaraderie among those clocking off in the early hours, and it is these cafés and diners that provide a venue for this much-deserved knees-up.

The third photograph is of the café that’s actually inside the wholesale markets, after dark.

The last photograph was taken inside the Moseley Street Café, which is actually opposite the Wholesale Markets. It’s like entering a time warp; i doubt it has changed at all in the last 30 years.

All photographs were taken with an old Lomo Smena 8M camera, with Kodak Elite Chrome slide film and then cross-processed.