His final shoot was in a derelict swimming pool in Bolton. The model was a skinny, nervous lad named Callum, a picker at an Amazon warehouse. The roof leaked, and the only light was grey and wet. James didn’t even use a flash. He just stood there, clicking his ancient digital camera, while Callum laughed about his nan’s dog that only ate cheese.

His star discovery was a kid named Liam from Doncaster. Liam was a roofer’s apprentice, nineteen, with ears that stuck out like jug handles and a smile that was half-charming, half-feral. James shot him on a discarded sofa in an alleyway, drinking a can of warm Fanta. The set cost nothing. The result was pure gold. Subscribers called it “the poetry of the pavement.”

James Nichols refused.

His method was legendary, and slightly terrifying. James didn’t book models through agencies. He found them. He’d park his battered Ford Transit outside a Wetherspoons in Leeds, or a Halfords carpark in Birmingham, and just watch. He had an eye for a certain kind of energy—the way a boy ran a hand through his hair, the confident slouch, the scar on a knuckle, the gap in a front tooth.

James Nichols of EnglishLads was not a man who dealt in the abstract. While other site owners spoke of “communities” and “platforms,” James spoke of lads. Real lads. The kind who kicked a scuffed-up ball against a brick wall in a Manchester drizzle, who smelled of Lynx Africa and last night’s chips, who had a laugh that could peel paint off a garden shed.

“They’re not ‘content,’” he’d snarl into his Nokia brick phone. “They’re lads. From England. It’s right there in the name.”

But running EnglishLads was like trying to keep a firefly alive in a jam jar. The internet was changing. Free tube sites were cannibalising paid content. And then the banks, the payment processors, the moral guardians—they all came calling. They didn’t like the word “lads.” They didn’t like the unpolished, working-class reality of it. They wanted professional, sanitised, corporate-approved content.

He’d founded EnglishLads in the mid-2000s, a tiny, rough-around-the-edges website born from a simple, almost anthropological obsession. He was tired of the airbrushed, Californian surfer boys who looked like they’d never had a fight or a kebab. He wanted the builders, the brickies, the lads from the estate agents and the Saturday football leagues.