Over four years, Chris Steele-Perkins photographed 164 families whose backgrounds extend across 188 countries and who had made London their home. The New Londoners gathers these encounters into a collective portrait of the capital, approaching migration not as an abstraction or a set of statistics, but through households, relationships and individual accounts. Its subject is London as constituted by successive arrivals and by the lives built after arrival.

Each family is photographed at home and accompanied by an interview. That decision gives the project its particular register: the domestic interior becomes both a personal setting and a fragment of the wider city. Steele-Perkins maintains the directness of formal portraiture while allowing clothing, furnishings, gestures and family groupings to carry social detail. The interviews establish a parallel narrative, bringing varied experiences and perspectives into a book whose breadth does not erase the specificity of its participants.

Published in 2019, when Brexit had sharpened public arguments over national identity and immigration, the work acquired an especially pointed context. Rather than illustrating a single political thesis, it places many distinct histories alongside one another. The resulting account recognizes immigration as integral to modern Britain while showing that the category “Londoner” can contain differences of origin, generation and circumstance.

Dewi Lewis Publishing’s 348-page hardcover gives this extended survey the scale appropriate to its premise. For collectors, the book merits attention for the sustained nature of the undertaking and for its conjunction of photographic portraiture with first-person testimony. It is at once a substantial work by Steele-Perkins and a time-specific social document: a record of who could be pictured as belonging to London at a consequential moment in the city’s history.