Kavi Pujara was born in Leicester in the early 1970s, ten minutes from the Golden Mile, and visited most weekends to see his grandmother. He left for London at eighteen and stayed away for nearly thirty years. This Golden Mile, published by Setanta Books in 2022, is what happened when he came back with a young family and a camera, and found a community he had grown up in but no longer knew.

The title is deliberately misleading. Pujara’s subject is not the commercial stretch of Melton Road and Belgrave Road — the sari shops, restaurants and jewellers — but the smaller streets feeding off it. His own framing locates the project in homes, temples and street corners, in alleys and gaps in steel fencing that open onto disused industrial ground. The book gathers fifty-seven images across 116 pages.

The photographs were made after the 2016 referendum, with immigration law and rhetoric hardening in the years that followed. Pujara photographs a neighbourhood under that pressure without reducing it to argument; the sequence moves through ordinary places where a community lives, worships and works. For a collector, the book’s interest lies in that restraint, in a first-generation subject returning as an established photographer, and in an exhibition at the Martin Parr Foundation that accompanied publication.

Setanta Books issued it in hardcover at 220 by 265 mm, printed on two different paper stocks — a production choice that gives the sequence a physical register beyond the page.