After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024; Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever – review

Given that we live in a time defined by the rise of far-right populism and a widespread indifference to traditional party politics, the idea of a unified “working class” seems almost romantic, a throwback to an age when Labour was synonymous with socialism rather than centrism. In this context, a Hayward Gallery touring exhibition, After the End of History, is a defiant statement, though it’s less a celebration of shared values and traditions than a series of revealing glimpses of what curator Johny Pitts describes as the “complex and counterintuitive expressions of working-class life”.The show’s high-flown title refers to the political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s controversial assertion that history of a kind ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumph of liberal democracy. Much of the work on the walls is too personal and too local to be read in this context, but it does reflect Pitts’s stated aim to create an exhibition “full of contradictions, like working-class li...