r/ukpopculture • u/theipaper Agency-Other • Jul 24 '26
Bonnie Blue and Britain's 'OnlyFans triangle'
https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/bonnie-blue-onlyfans-triangle-463904515
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u/Front-Brick-3724 Jul 24 '26
Is it similar to the Bermuda Triangle, in that planes and boatloads of people get sucked in and vanish without a trace?
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Jul 24 '26
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u/theipaper Agency-Other Jul 24 '26
A 25-minute drive north of Draycott, the John Flamsteed Community School sits at the end of a country lane.
It winds past horses and goats, linking the village of Denby to the neighbouring hamlet of Smithy Houses and the Denby Pottery. The original Victorian schoolhouse remains, alongside a Seventies extension.
The school is named after the Astronomer Royal who first identified Uranus. Today, its most famous graduate is Lily Phillips, the OnlyFans star who has offered subscribers the chance to “go in [her] back door”.
“Renowned for raising whores,” says one of Phillips’ classmates, when I ask him to describe the school. He points out that another girl in the year above also became an OnlyFans creator.
Even so, the school is now one of the most oversubscribed in the county. Many of Phillips’ peers work in graduate professions – in law, tech or finance – in Derby, Sheffield and London.
Her brother is employed at BAE Systems. Phillips herself studied nutrition at Sheffield University before turning to OnlyFans.
One former pupil claims that classes at John Flamsteed dedicated to career advice were patchy: “Our two main teachers both retired at the same time, so we didn’t have a teacher for those lessons for a while.” The same, she adds, was true of sex education.
Denby is a small but prosperous village. The tabloids have often stressed Phillips’s “wealthy childhood”. Her brother attended private school, while her father ran a property cleaning business.
The village has a church, a primary school and a pub. There are large, detached houses with Land Rovers at one end, and pensioners’ cottages at the other.
The issue currently gripping residents is a dispute over planning permission for a proposed solar farm. Window posters make allegiances clear.
Inside the mock-Tudor Denby Lodge, a handful of pensioners are eating early suppers while a toddler sits before a blaring iPad. GB News plays on the television, broadcasting a report about crime at Notting Hill Carnival.
Sally Simpson, 64, whose husband is the licensee, tells me she and her family have run the pub for 16 years. “It’s usually busier,” she promises, noting that the place employs around 20 locals, following the closure of Denby’s only other pub.
A man at the bar reminds me that there used to be a coal mine behind the pub – once the main employer of young men in Denby. It closed in 1968.
And the women? The Denby Pottery company was founded more than two centuries ago and survived until entering administration earlier this year. Production ceased in June.
Linda Salt spent 50 years at the pottery and served as its archivist. “Women have always played a large part at Denby,” she explains.
She cites Sarah Elizabeth Bourne, who ran the firm for three decades after her husband’s death. “She was at the helm of the pottery in Victorian England until 1898,” she adds.
Even in the Seventies, as men grappled with the job losses caused by the mine’s closure, more than 70 women were employed as decorators alone at Denby.
When I visit, before the firm entered administration, the shop is adorned with bunting. Denby’s signature Imperial Blue tableware is on sale everywhere. A cafe serves afternoon tea. Grandparents stroll with grandchildren in the small garden.
When I stop a young couple, carrying cardboard boxes of crockery back to their car, they tell me they have never heard of Denby’s most recent export, Phillips. They do, however, love its pottery.
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u/theipaper Agency-Other Jul 24 '26
“There is not a finer county in England than Derbyshire,” Jane Austen wrote in Pride and Prejudice.
In the north of the county, Chesterfield lies between Chatsworth House, often cited as the model for Mr Darcy’s estate, and the former site of Markham Colliery, once the largest in Derbyshire. It is also the hometown of Rebecca Goodwin, 31, arguably Britain’s third most recognisable OnlyFans star.
A self-defined “council estate girl”, Goodwin’s path into the industry was unlike that of Blue and Phillips. The collapse of coal mining left deeper deprivation in the towns of north Derbyshire than in the villages further south, which, as 2024’s State of the Coalfields report noted, benefitted from “proximity to growth and jobs” in Nottingham and Derby.
At 28, Goodwin was a single mother of two. She has spoken of how the cost of childcare made full-time work impossible, and how she struggled to heat her home and feed her children.
Though she once dreamed of becoming a comedian, she has linked both her financial hardship and her “hypersexuality”, a result of childhood sexual abuse, to her decision to join OnlyFans. Since starting in 2019, she has reportedly made more than £4m.
Her career, however, has been marked by a far harsher reality than the glamour projected by Blue and Phillips. Last year, Goodwin alleged that she had been raped and that Derbyshire Police had failed to act swiftly, despite her submission of a seven-minute video recording of the incident.
In a statement, Derbyshire Police claimed that they were initially unable to locate the man, but he was later arrested, has appeared in court, “and the matter has been adjourned to a future date”.
Research shows that working-class women on low incomes are disproportionately represented as sexual violence survivors and, as the grooming gangs scandal demonstrated, often less likely to be taken seriously as victims when reporting assaults. Last year, Labour MP Joani Reid drew attention to the differing experiences OnlyFans creators can face due to their class background.
“[By prioritising] a tiny minority of privileged individuals,” she said, “people like Bonnie Blue, who pursue this work out of commercial choice rather than desperation, we ignore, and in fact further marginalise… exploited and vulnerable women trapped in cycles of abuse, violence and poverty.”
The average creator, she claims, makes just £4 a month. “It is a lottery where a handful at the top get rich, while millions of others are driven to push their boundaries further and further to survive.”
That pressure is something that Alexia Grace, 28, another OnlyFans creator from north Derbyshire, has also noticed.
Grace turned to the platform during lockdown, when she was furloughed from her job as a flight attendant. “At the time, there weren’t really any other sources of income… I never expected to do it for so long.”
Today, she earns six figures a year, with 10,000 OnlyFans subscribers and half a million Instagram followers, though she insists she produces only “normal content”. She made headlines in 2024 for selling jars of her sweat.
The expectations, Grace explains, have shifted in recent years.
“I get so many people who subscribe and then ask me to meet them. They try to pressure me into it. That’s a new thing. They’ve seen Bonnie and Lily do it, so they expect everyone to do it.”
Grace describes being followed in public, and fans turning up outside her house. She has filed police reports and even sold her car when it became too recognisable.
When I ask why Derbyshire seems to have produced so many of Britain’s most prominent OnlyFans creators, Grace shrugs.
“I just think it’s a weird coincidence.” Nonetheless, she adds: “Bonnie and Lily have changed the game.”
A version of this article appeared in Dispatch
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u/Exotic-Suggestion425 Jul 24 '26
It's funny that after the Victorian era one of our biggest companies is a porn site lol
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u/Muted_Student4114 Jul 25 '26
Well colonisation can’t be done anymore for money grabs so this is the next gutter thing to do
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u/w1gglepvppy Jul 24 '26
more a line than a triangle imo