Revival gathers photographs Roy Mehta made between 1989 and 1993 in Harlesden and Willesden, the northwest London districts where he was then living. The area has a long history of multiculturalism, and Mehta’s subjects are chiefly its Black and Irish communities, photographed in black and white in the middle of ordinary activity: at home, in the street, at church.

The title is not incidental. Much of the book turns on gathering and continuance — congregations, interiors, the noise of the pavement outside — and the sequence moves between those registers rather than settling into one. Caryl Phillips contributes an introduction, so that a writer’s voice sits alongside a photographer’s and the volume carries a second register of address.

Hoxton Mini Press published the book in 2021 as a 96-page hardcover, roughly 19.5 by 24.7 centimetres, small enough to be read as a sequence rather than consulted as a survey. Mehta’s monochrome keeps the work close to a documentary lineage; the pictures were made while the decade they describe was still unfolding, and they reached book form some thirty years later.

The series has since travelled. Pictures from Revival appeared in a Tate Britain exhibition given over to 1980s photography, and the project has been presented at Brent Museum and Archives and in the Photo50 display at the London Art Fair — settings that place Mehta’s Brent alongside other photographers who pictured British multicultural life from within. For a collector, the interest lies less in scarcity than in position: a sustained body of work, made early, published late, and now part of a wider reconsideration of how that London was seen by the people living in it.