CITY LIFE BEFORE AND AFTER LOCKDOWN: LIVING IN A CORONAVIRUS WORLD
One of the UK’s best-known street photographers was joined by hundreds of amateur photographers between 2017-2019 in a unique social experiment to capture the spirit of some of the UK’s biggest cities in 24 hours.
Building a visual library of what Manchester, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool and Newcastle looked like in that day in history, the A Day In The Life experiment compiled thousands of images of the people and places that made those bustling cities tick – from buskers to office workers, students, skateboarders, OAPs, tourists, and many more.
But as we entered 2020, life as we knew it was about to change…
As the Coronavirus pandemic swept across the world, the UK officially entered lockdown on March 23rd 2020.
Millions of people were now working from home, furloughed from jobs or made redundant; non-essential businesses were forced to close their doors to customers and public travel was limited.
Our cities and streets had become ghost towns.
As lockdown measures begin to ease, our cities will see people return — but what type of ‘new normal’ awaits us?
Photographer, Mark Waugh, took to the streets of Manchester once more to capture life as the city’s bars and restaurants reopen on what was known as Super Saturday, 4th July 2020.
Today this library provides a stark reminder of what our cities looked like before and after lockdown. View the ‘before’ and ‘after’ images of these cities, available for free use, here:
AFTER
- Manchester images (from 4th July 2020) Click here
BEFORE
- Manchester images (from 1st April 2017) Click here
- Bristol images (from 19th August 2017) Click here
- Glasgow images (from 7th April 2018) Click here
- Liverpool images (from 28th October 2018) Click here
- Newcastle images (from 23rd March 2019) Click here
- Cardiff images (from 28th September 2019) Click here
The experiment has huge poignance today. Describing why it was created in the first place, event organiser, Ian Cowley of Cartridge Save, explained: “The project was created because we recognised the potential to capture pictures that would last for years to come, as a snapshot of the city on that particular day.
“Life is fast, nowhere more so than in cities. That’s what made A Day In The Life so appealing – we were taking moments in time and freezing them. Little did we imagine that only a few months later, life in cities would be put on pause.”
