Normanton or ‘Normz’ is an inner city suburb and ward of the city of Derby.

A diverse yet impoverished working-class area. I lived in this area for my entire childhood before we moved so I could go to a better secondary school.

It’s August 2020 in the UK, where I’m located, we’re currently in post-lockdown. Meaning the majority of businesses, shops, and services are now open for operation again. During May 2020 when we in the UK were in full lockdown I began going out more to photograph the changes in daily life around the city of Derby, I went to parks, fields, the city centre, and sub-urban areas, all of which were void of much interest after photographing them over and over from the end of March through to May. The world around me seemed to be stuck in an infinite loop, seeing people queuing up outside of shops for bread and milk became so normal that it was no longer fascinating to take photographs of people. This was when I decided to buy a small Raleigh fold-up bike and cycle around South Derbyshire photographing places I found along the way, which was a great way to get out of the ‘Coronaverse’ for a while as the lack of people in these places felt normal.

A few weeks after this I discovered that my friends were going on bike rides also, so we decided to go on some rides around the city and just outside of it. It was then that one of my friends told me that Normanton was still as lively as ever during lockdown, I immediately thought that I must see this for myself, as a place ‘lively as ever’ in this current climate has got to be worth documenting. So that’s when I unintentionally began shooting this project. It first started out just capturing the overall atmosphere in Normanton duding lockdown, which after a few days I began to notice that a lot of the images captured children. I think the reason for this was the closing of schools during the pandemic coupled with the fact there are a lot of children under the age of 14 in the area, Four-Thousand Four-Hundred and Fifty-Five to be exact (4455) (as of 2011). This is the largest child population in all of Derby’s seventeen wards/areas.