Lockdown Zine / July 2020

By simply taking the city into their neighbourhoods, people did their part in the effort
against the health crisis. Photographer Michael Kirkham spent lockdown documenting
these smaller worlds thriving on the streets of Wavertree.
The world is now an inherently smaller place. In the age of
expansive globalisation, few will have predicted this would occur
with such little notice. Lockdown seemed to arrive swift, but fewer
will have known it didn’t come near swift enough.
Beyond key workers, coming to terms with our smaller worlds will have
been common for those confined to their homes. But while the tangible
reaches of existence have contracted, the worlds which we locally share
haven’t become deserted. With new, tighter perimeters applied to the dayto-day,
our lives have become inversely more detailed. The localised lens
through which we’ve viewed lockdown is a microscope of its own. The larger
telescopic frame of the world beyond our streets is more pixelated than ever.
As we work, think and exist within the confines of our postcode, the
finer details of our immediate surroundings have stepped into a new clarity.
Buildings seem to stand stiller and offer a closer look in the longer shadows
of spring. Our daily heatmap of footsteps seems to be concerned with who
and what is here, rather than there. We’ve probably
never seen so much of our neighbours.
It’s momentary frames like these that have
become the subject of documentary photographer
Michael Kirkham’s latest work: a series of photographs
which show a city retreated into its streets, where
seemingly every street has become a village.
The collection of images, which were taken
within a few miles radius of his home, mushroomed
from late March and were initially just as a means
of coping with lockdown. “When out with my
camera in the last month, it was just a case of taking
snapshots,” he says, “little things that caught my
eye. Human interactions, moments that have been created by the pandemic,
objects that have been left behind because of it.”
Wind the clock back to mid-March and the streets around us painted
a different picture to their current slowness. A tense atmosphere weighed
in the air. Shops and restaurants teetered over calling for continued
support or closing their doors for safety. Offices gradually morphed into
living rooms. The notion of considerate British mannerisms lay in tatters as
queues splintered and shop shelves were left hit as though by a swarm of
locusts. “There was a bit of a vibe, a bit of panic” says Kirkham of his initial
experience around Wavertree. “There was a certain edge to everything. You
had people glancing in each other’s trolleys with expressions of ‘What do
you even need those for?’ That sort of behaviour was at a sharp edge when
the lockdown was about to arrive.”
Once the lockdown solidified, the tension Kirkham notes relieved
and streets brandished themselves clearer than ever before. There’s a
palpable sense of acceptance in the stillness of his photographs of queues
and vacated business. Our streets themselves bathed in an early spring,
picturesque and unnerving, like pictures of the model towns used to test
nuclear weapons. “It’s quite a strange and surreal situation when focusing
the camera on the busier streets like Picton Road. It’s so quiet you can walk
through the middle of it,” he says.
The vacuous elements of Kirkhams’s photos are a common feature for
most hubs of commerce. But it’s in the tighter streets where micro features of
a new localised society come into greater focus. Away from shuttered shop
fronts and supermarket queues, more front doors are being left ajar. Their
communities are spilling out onto the streets at a safe distance, breaking with
the closed off divide that bookends the normal working day.
“During the first half of lockdown the weather was beautiful. We have
a south-facing back yard, so we were spending a lot of time out there,”
Kirkham says. “But everyone opposite, they were all out in the front; talking
with each other, neighbours having drinks over the fence, children playing at
a distance in the street.
“I got to know a lot
of my neighbours
when I moved in,
but since lockdown,
I’ve gotten to know
pretty much everyone
on my street”
“My street is quite friendly. I got to know a lot of my neighbours when
I moved in,” he continues, “but since lockdown I’ve gotten to know pretty
much everyone. Everyone is chatting away when they get the chance. A lot
more people say hello. You get the sense that people in the local community
feel like they’re all in the same boat.” Kirkham’s images
show neighbours talking while perched on opposing
pavements. In another, a group are playing makeshift
tennis while wearing PPE. An image of The Edinburgh
Pub, its proprietor adding a layer of varnish to its
Victorian windows, could have been pulled from a
sleepy Sunday in a rural town. “It’s mellowed a lot
from the initial atmosphere, and I think you can see
that in the series of images,” Kirkham replies. “It’s
been nice – in a strange way, once you’re over the
shock of having to queue for shops and struggling to
buy things likes paracetamol and toilet paper.”
For residential areas, unlike the city centre of
Liverpool or its commercial thoroughfares, the presence of fewer people
doesn’t brandish bare bones devoid of community. A quick look at the empty
faces of Lord Street and Church Street tell you how much sincere community
can be hinged on transactional commerce and marketing.
But it’s not just in Wavertree where streets have become villages of
their own. Walk to the riverside of L8 and peer down each of the sloping
‘Bread Streets’ and you’ll see families perched on chairs outside their home,
conversing with their neighbours on the other side of the road, children
taking their turn to run the chalked hopscotch which lines the pavements
running down to the river, where ever-clearer views of Welsh hills are
seemingly in touching distance.
By simply taking the city into their streets people are doing their part in
the effort against the health crisis. All across Liverpool groups have come
together while remaining at a distance. A community effort to match the
mounting health risks has risen in tandem. While it doesn’t replace the huge
losses of life and livelihoods that have occurred, perhaps there’s positives to
be had in the conscious drive to replant our streets as collections of homes
within a community. !
Words: Elliot Ryder
Photography: Michael Kirkham / @Mrkirks
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