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Like most people Joseph Sinclair-Parker was working when PM Boris Johnson told Londoners that they should stay inside and avoid contact with others to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
But unlike the rest of us scurrying back to the safety of our homes, Sinclair-Parker, a 28 year-old photographer and art director who lives in Shoreditch with his partner, decided to brave the coronavirus lockdown in order to take photograph what he describes as ‘London in lockdown’.
‘Curiosity led me out,’ he explains, ‘after I heard Boris’ making this huge life-changing announcement I just wanted to go into central London to see how seriously everyone was taking it.’ Travelling by bicycle, armed with his 35mm camera, Sinclair-Parker decided to start travelling around the rest of the city documenting the London Lockdown.
One of the first things he noticed was his local pub – The Carpenter’s Arms (once an infamous haunt of the Kray Twins). ‘The shutters were down, the windows were barred and it suddenly all felt very, well… apocalyptic.’
As he cycled into town Sinclair-Parker explains he ‘started to notice lots of pubs had put up these handwritten notes.’ He stopped to photograph them, including one which touched him in particular. ‘I saw a letter on doors to The Golden Heart opposite Spitalfields Market and it was this oddly intimate letter by the landlady Sandra Esquilant to her punters,’ he says. ‘The language just touched me. They were telling their customers: “if you need anything get in touch” and it just made me think that for some people the only human contact they may have is in that pub. When it closes that could be their entire social network slamming shut. Pubs are these amazing places where people have always gone to blow off steam – right through wars even – and now they are closed. It just made me think: humans are such fragile things.’
And it wasn’t just pubs, he continues. ‘In Carnaby Street all of the smaller, independent shops had notes saying that they were moving online. Who knows if some of them will come back after all this is over – the letters they wrote made it sound like they might not.’
But it was when he arrived in Piccadilly Circus, that Sinclair-Parker found his journey through Covid-19 London most unsettling. ‘It was just eerie. When I arrived there was this street performer all alone by the Eros statue, still trying to make a buck,’ he explains. ‘He was doing some sort of contemporary dance and apart from the pigeons nobody was watching him perform. At this time on a normal day it would have been packed full of tourists and ordinary Londoners going about their days. But today it was dead.’
Sinclair Parker has already started documenting more scenes which he is adding to his series entitled ‘Covid-19: London Falls Silent’, including portraits of people trying to continue life under lockdown, which he is regularly posting to his Instagram (@jsinclairparker).
Click through the above gallery to see more photographs from his series.
