In 1986 and 1987, Chris Dorley-Brown photographed more than forty drivers held up in East London traffic. The subject is not speed but waiting: faces settling into boredom, frustration, or an unexpected calm. The pictures are funny without being cruel, and exact about the mood and fashion of a period that now looks both near and remote.

Hoxton Mini Press published Drivers in the 1980s in 2015 as the sixth book in its East London Photo Stories series. Dorley-Brown had lived and worked in the East End for three decades, documenting Hackney and its communities. Here, the traffic jam becomes a temporary studio. Drivers are framed through windscreens, isolated in their cars yet visible to anyone who cares to look. The repetition is the point: one after another, the photographs build a collective portrait out of private pauses.

The book is a compact hardcover of 96 pages, quarter-bound and gold-foiled, measuring 199 by 139 mm. Its small scale suits the intimacy of the encounter, while the sequence preserves incidental detail—clothing, dashboard clutter, the interiors of ordinary cars—as a record of daily life under a particular kind of pressure. The foreword touches on the politics of the moment, including the privatisation-era climate and the cars that carried people through it.

What distinguishes the project is its deadpan patience. Dorley-Brown does not dramatise his sitters; he lets them be ordinary. In doing so, he turns a mundane delay into a study of public solitude, and a specific stretch of East London into a wider portrait of England in the 1980s. For collectors of British documentary photography and London photobooks, the volume matters not because it is scarce but because it holds an early, sharply observed position in Dorley-Brown’s career and in Hoxton Mini Press’s ongoing project of mapping the East End.