Chris Coekin began photographing the Acomb Working Men’s Club in York in 1996, and the pictures he made there over the years form the core of Knock Three Times. The club belongs to a tradition of institutions founded for the support and education of working men; many such clubs have closed, though the movement still counts six million members across the United Kingdom. Coekin came to the subject with firsthand knowledge: as a child he visited clubs with his parents in Leicester and on family holidays elsewhere in England. That familiarity shapes the book’s temperament, which is neither sentimental nor detached.

Working from photographs and archival material, Coekin treats the club as a place where working-class culture can be examined in its full complexity. The book considers masculinity, relationships and the work ethic as they are enacted in the ordinary rituals of club life — the rooms, the members, the accumulated records of an institution sustained by its own community. David Campany introduces the volume, and his essay gives the pictures a critical frame without overdetermining them.

The sequence was made for the printed page, and its design honours that: a square hardback of 96 pages and roughly 247 millimetres on each side, carrying sixty colour photographs. The format suits a body of work that attends to social space and to the ways people hold themselves within it.

For collectors of British documentary photography, Knock Three Times is a considered example of a photographer returning to a single community over time, and of a subject — the Working Men’s Club — that is inseparable from the recent social history of the country. Published by Dewi Lewis in 2006, it sits within a strong lineage of British photobooks concerned with class, place and belonging.