What we do in the sunrise: New photobook documents the ecstatic haze of being young and partying all night

There’s no feeling like being young, emerging from the darkness of the club in the wee hours — hand-in-hand with your best mates as the sunlight penetrates your retinas; a brand new day full of possibilities; with everyone else still wrapped up snugly in their beds, feeling like the world is yours. In new photobook Not Going Home, documentary and portrait photographer Mischa Haller captures that jubilant after-hours feeling — with a series of images taken in nightlife hotspots across the UK, throughout the summer of 1998.

Published by the British Culture Archive, Not Going Home features images taken in London, Birmingham, Leeds, Brighton, Edinburgh and more. “I was interested in the time between the nightclub closing and people going home, those one or two hours when the rest of the world is asleep, but clubbers are carrying on,” says Haller. “These moments hang in the memory – eating, smoking, chatting, making a fire on the beach or meeting someone new.”

Read this next: New photobook Drumz of The South will celebrate the golden years of dubstep

The scenes framed by Haller vary, but all share that bawdy exuberance that only rolling out of the club after a night of getting up to no good can bring. Some groups can be seen flowing out of takeaways faces emblazoned with a cheeky grin as they wait for a cab home; others are huddled together on the beach, sharing a ciggie as they take in the horizon. There are a series of images from the hey day of Strawberry Sundae, the infamous party that once frequented Cloud9 club in Vauxhall, London – with one raver even showing off her tattoo tribute to Haller’s lens.