114. England’s Last Hurrah - with legendary photographer Dafydd Jones

Break Out Culture With Ed Vaizey by Country and Town House

Dafydd Jones’s photographs of Oxford’s ‘bright young things’ catapulted him to fame and earnt him a global reputation for capturing the essence of a riotous world of upper-class decadence during the Thatcher era. Tina Brown was quick to scoop Dafydd up when she was editor of Tatler, and on today’s podcast he talks about his new book ‘England: The Last Hurrah’ and describes what it was like to break into a world that revolved around glamorous parties in stately homes and annual events like the Oxbridge May Balls and the 4th June at Eton.

His satirical but beautiful black and white photographs lend an elegiac nostalgic quality to what Tina Brown describes in her introduction to the book as ‘whimsey and frolicky romance’. Dafydd captured some of the most iconic images of our age, including a lonely, hunted Diana Spencer facing a barrage of press photographers at the Sandown Park race meeting in March 1981.

Listen in to hear what it was really like for Dafydd to be at all those uproarious parties, then go home to his family and hang his dinner jacket up in the yard to get rid of the smell of cigarette smoke. Modest though he is, Dafydd’s photographs will endure for having perfectly captured a society on the brink of decline. Unmissable listening.

An exhibition of Dafydd’s photographs runs at The Centre for British Photography on 49 Jermyn Street, London until the beginning of June.