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.”

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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.

“I was laying the foundations for the publishing side of British Culture Archive when Misha Haller sent me his series of early morning clubber in 1998," says British Culture Archives' Paul Wright. "The images immediately struck a chord with me, not only were they amazing photographs, they captured that last special era in club and youth culture."

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"It’s getting a bit cliché to say now, but it doesn’t change the fact that Gen X were the last generation to grow up with a sense of freedom," he continues. "I was a regular at nights such as Hard Times and Back to Basics around that time, and looking at Haller’s images I was fully drawn in and transported back to the hedonistic times and amazing memories we all created. I knew I had to get these images in a book and kick start the publishing arm of BCA.”

Not Going Home features a foreword by journalist Kate Spicer, and is made up of 47 pages detailing "post-club Britain" in 1998. You can order yours here.

Look at more images from Misha Haller's Not Going Home, below:

Megan Townsend is Mixmag's Deputy Editor, follow her on Twitter