Orlando Gili’s Trivial Pursuits: The English at Play begins with a question its author could not put down. After the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, the London-born photographer wanted to know who the English actually are. Rather than look to Westminster or the pulpit, he looked at the weekend — and at what people there choose to do with their free time.

The resulting photographs move between horse racing and wartime re-enactments, carnivals and clubs, taking in medieval village bottle-kicking competitions alongside Santa pub crawls. Gili photographs these occasions as evidence rather than curiosities. Costume, rules, spectatorship, mud and weather all belong to the picture, and the participants, not the photographer, set the terms. What emerges is a study of organised fun, and of the stubborn sociability that survives inside a divided country.

The title carries its own irony: what the book calls trivial turns out to be one of the few things holding a contradictory nation together. Lucy Davies contributes an introduction, and Hoxton Mini Press publishes the volume in hardcover — 112 pages, in a compact format of roughly 21 by 16 centimetres, released in 2020.

For a collector, the case for the book rests on cohesion rather than scarcity. It is a single subject pursued patiently across one country, with a sequence that sets older rituals against newer inventions and lets the two illuminate each other. Photographs of this kind depend on being in the right field on the right afternoon; the book gathers those afternoons into an argument about belonging, leisure and national self-description. It rewards a reader who wants a subject examined at length rather than a portfolio of highlights.