In 1992, Martin Parr spent a year photographing Chew Stoke, a rural Somerset village outside Bristol, for a sustained study of its daily life and social relationships. Published in 2022 by RRB Photobooks, *A Year in the Life of Chew Stoke Village* returns to that assignment three decades later, when falling house prices, economic pressure, and the arrival of new residents were quietly altering the village’s social balance. Its subject is not rural England as an image of stability, but a community negotiating continuity and change.

Parr gains access through repetition and participation: summer fetes, evenings in the pub, lawn bowls, cricket, and other seasonal gatherings become the structure of the work. These familiar forms of village life are neither romanticised nor treated as mere local colour. Parr’s attention falls on gestures, encounters, awkwardness, and affiliation—the specific human texture through which a community defines itself. The result is a documentary portrait that is intimate without becoming sentimental, and sharply observed without reducing its subjects to social types.

The book brings together more than forty previously unpublished photographs from the 1992 project. Robert Chesshyre’s text, originally commissioned for *Telegraph Magazine*, is placed alongside a new essay by Diane Smyth, which considers the work in the context of documentary photography and Parr’s wider career from a 2022 perspective. That combination gives the volume both the immediacy of its original moment and the benefit of historical reflection.

For collectors, the book is significant as an extended, locally grounded example of Parr’s British social documentary practice: a project built not from isolated photographs but from sustained observation across a full year. The 2022 RRB Photobooks hardcover preserves that temporal and editorial logic, making the volume valuable not simply as another Parr title, but as a focused record of how everyday rituals reveal the pressures acting upon a community.