Joanna Biggs: 'Work is where we make friends, exert power, fall in love'

In All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work, Biggs interviewed everyone from footballers to shoemakers about the activity in which we spend a third of our lives. She discusses a demanding, rewarding process

I set myself an impossible task in trying to capture what it was like to work in post-crash Britain, so I would often find myself dreaming of an impossible book: an oral history of every person working in the UK in 2015. Over the two and a half years I researched and wrote All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work, my recurring worry was about selection: why a footballer and not a cricketer? Why a mother and not a nanny? The artist Jenny Holzer put a slogan on an old-fashioned movie theatre hoarding once: “Everyone’s Work Is Equally Important”, and it seemed never more true than when I was preparing this book, and I was making everyone from my parents to my windowcleaner tell me about their working lives.

Some of the selection was straightforward: modern Britain wouldn’t be modern Britain without its bankers, its footballers, its politicians. But there are so many jobs we don’t know exist: what’s a giggle doctor, or a spad? And many more are ubiquitous but ill-understood: what is it like being a Premiership footballer, or a sex worker? I built my cast of characters slowly, and interviewed a third more people that I knew I would have room for in the book. I went to exclusive Oxford colleges and run-down factories in Bolton; rural Scottish islands and to No 10 Downing Street. I changed my mind until the last minute, interviewing my final worker a few weeks before I handed in the final manuscript.

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