London in Lockdown takes as its subject a city that briefly stopped. Published by Hoxton Mini Press in 2021 and made in association with the Museum of London, it gathers work by twenty-four photographers, each responding to the same disrupted year from a different vantage point. The result is not one argument about the pandemic but a set of overlapping observations, held together by place.

The emotional register is unusually wide: anxiety and grief sit alongside boredom, intimacy, and a sharpened attention to nature, and much of the work looks for community and connection in a year that made both harder to sustain. That mixture is the book’s method. Where a solo monograph would impose a single temperament on the period, this collection lets contrast do the work, setting quieter domestic frames against views of an emptied capital. Twenty-four sensibilities keep the book moving between registers rather than settling into one.

The institutional framing matters. Jilke Golbach, Curator of Photographs at the Museum of London, is credited as the book’s author, and the museum’s involvement gives the project a documentary purpose: a record assembled for a city’s own archive rather than a portfolio presented by an individual. Readers who know the museum’s holdings will recognise the logic — the everyday life of London documented as it happens, before memory tidies it up.

Physically the volume is modest in scale and substantial in extent: hardcover, 254 pages, roughly 23 by 18 centimetres, heavy enough to suggest a generous use of plates. For a collector, the case rests on the breadth of the roster and that museum affiliation rather than on scarcity. Twenty-four photographers appear between one cover, which makes the book useful as a cross-section of photographic practice at a particular moment, and as a fixed record of a year Londoners would otherwise recall only in fragments.