Published by RRB Publishing in 2016, Ken Grant’s A Topical Times for These Times presents a sustained documentary study of Liverpool’s football culture created across several decades since the 1980s. Rather than prioritizing the spectacle within professional stadiums, Grant positions his camera outside the turnstiles: in district parks hosting youth and local pub teams, along neighborhood streets, inside public transit buses, and throughout crowded match-day bars. Through this deliberate vantage point, football emerges not merely as an isolated athletic pastime, but as a central social fabric anchoring the working-class community of his native city.

The work documents the urban and psychological terrain of Liverpool as it traversed periods of sporting triumph, collective tragedy, and accelerating commercial transformation. Taking inspiration from the popular boys’ sports yearbooks of the 1970s and 1980s, the publication balances communal memory with an unvarnished examination of regional identity. Grant avoids nostalgic simplification, framing the sport’s rituals as everyday lived experience inseparable from the city’s broader social changes.

Designed by Victoria Forrest, this hardcover volume features an essay by author Niall Griffiths alongside introductory reflections from Grant himself. For collectors and scholars of British documentary traditions, the photobook offers a rigorous, long-form exploration of working-class leisure and civic allegiance, functioning as an essential social document of northern English life.