BLACK AND WHITE TOWN

CASE STUDY

Journalist and photographer Anita Chaudhuri talks through her Lockdown in the City photography series and what the future might hold for the Square Mile

Anita Chaudhuri, a journalist who has lived in London for thirty years, began taking pictures of the City of London from mid-June to the end of September 2020. Calling it ‘Lockdown in the City’ It was, she says, partly in response to Boris Johnson’s assertion in June last year that the bustle can now return to the high street. The empty streets around Ludgate Hill certainly tell a different story. While documenting the months of the pandemic in pictures was something quite a few people decided to do, what marks out Chaudhuri’s work is that she deliberately focussed on one particular London location: the Square Mile, particularly the area around St Paul’s cathedral. The project meant an early start, arriving in the area at 7:30am to capture the scenes. She has shared an office with over a dozen other journalists in a building off one of the narrow streets north of Blackfriars for eighteen months but her association with the area dates back further.

“I have quite an emotional connection to this part of London, as my first job in

journalism was with PR Week which once had the address 100 Fleet Street.” While newspaper businesses in much of this famous thoroughfare, once so synonymous with hacks filing copy and printing presses whirring, decamped to other parts of the capital such as Canary Wharf, other parts of Fleet Street remain impervious to the change in industries over the decades. The Punch Tavern and the Old Bell, the locations for many a midday pint when long liquid lunches were a rite of passage for Fleet Street, still stand. Chaudhuri reflects further back. “All the little streets and alleys always struck me as quite Dickensian, your visual map is from books that you read,” she says. She chose black and white to really capture the area’s atmospheric quality, particularly prevalent during the summer months of last year’s restrictions. “What happened during lockdown was around this layer of sadness about how empty the City had become. The only people you saw were either wearing hard hats or belonged to takeaway delivery firms.”

That emptiness she adds, brought out the hard lines and the textures of the architecture. On a human scale she says, “I also had a feeling of concern for all the businesses around there, given the amount of ‘To Let’ signs appearing. In terms of change are people going to be bailing out of the City as soon as their leases are up or is there going to be a renaissance? Are there going to be a lot of independent businesses taking over these empty spaces?” Looking towards a more positive outcome she adds, “Is there going to be a bounce back, maybe rents will become more affordable which will attract more creatives back?”

CASE STUDY

CASE STUDY

One thing that is concerning is quite how many people will come back, whether that’s major tenants in office buildings or foreign tourists. If commercial tenants do take flight for good, will that mean an influx of creatives to the City and could it, in fact become the next cool part of town?

In some ways she says, it could be argued that this is a welcome corrective for London to prevent it going down the path of creating a soulless, homogenised downtown, which has become the fate of many cities around the world.

Chaudhuri moved to London thirty years ago and says that even after a decade in the capital “you start to see patterns repeat themselves, that things bounce back and that makes it easier to read the waves of change.”

Anita is associate editor of Psychologies magazine and is also currently studying for a masters in photography at the University of the Arts, London