Self-taught photographer Andrew Moore grew up in Tyneside in the industrial North East of England. In the early 1980s he moved to London to attend university, where he discovered photography and began documenting the city around him. With a camera in hand and a growing awareness of Britain’s social divides, he set out to record the pressures and transformations unfolding on the streets.

In 1985, Moore photographed the aftermath of the first night of the Handsworth riots in Birmingham — violent clashes rooted in long-standing racial discrimination, police harassment, and economic deprivation. Later that year he documented the Broadwater Farm riot in Tottenham, which erupted after the death of Cynthia Jarrett, a local woman who suffered a fatal heart attack during a police search of her home.

These early experiences shaped Moore’s approach as a photographer, pushing him to examine the social and political unrest that marked Britain during the Thatcher era. Through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, he continued to document the consequences of that period, including the Poll Tax riots of 1990, when thousands took to the streets to challenge a deeply unpopular government policy.