Two years, one neighbourhood, a shifting cast of young women: that is the working method behind New Girl Order. Iain McKell met a group of artists who had made a shared warehouse in Tottenham, in east London, the centre of their lives, and photographed them as they worked, performed and partied. They called themselves the sisterhood, and the phrase is worth keeping — it names both a social arrangement and the tone of the pictures.

McKell’s habit is to attach himself to scenes before the wider culture has settled on a name for them, and these photographs are not reportage from a polite distance. They carry the terms of the arrangement: people who let a photographer in, and a photographer who kept returning. What accumulates is less a set of separate portraits than a portrait of how a group defines itself — the costumes, the staging, the humour, the hedonism, and the seriousness underneath it.

Hoxton Mini Press published the book in 2019 as a hardcover of 160 pages, with an introduction by Gemma Padley. The format is modest, closer to an album than a monograph, and the sequence behaves accordingly: a visual diary assembled over time rather than an argument divided into chapters. The publisher has long treated London and its subcultures as serious subjects, and this volume belongs to that project without being merely topical.

For collectors of British documentary and subcultural photography, the draw is duration. Two years of access to a self-organised female creative community, photographed by one person, gives the book a coherence that single-assignment projects rarely reach. It also records a form of urban life — the cheap shared space, the collective enterprise — that London has been steadily losing. Padley supplies the framing; McKell supplies the evidence.