Any given Sunday
Matt Writtle spent 10 years photographing our day off — and the results are extraordinary, finds
ON A typical Sunday morning, most of the UK hits the snooze button. Not so for London, says photographer Matt Writtle, who has spent the past decade touring the country, shooting for his new book Sunday: A Portrait of 21st Century England. “It’s a lot more vibrant in the capital,” he says. “The rest of the country still tends to press pause, but the sheer number of people out on the streets here is a contrast. London is almost like a country on its own.”
Writtle’s portraits are windows on the ways in which the country unwinds. “I get a buzz out of documenting people’s lives, and getting an insight into things that people wouldn’t normally see.” Having spent a year travelling before starting the project — on a journey which took him from Thailand, Australia, New Zealand and Tahiti to Sri Lanka, Russia and the USA — Writtle, who has worked as a freelance photographer on the Evening Standard for the past 14 years, felt “like an outsider looking in to a very English tradition”.
The face of Sunday, he says, is changing. Church attendance is at an all-time low, we’re increasingly lost “to our own devices”, and “the increase in consum- erism post-1994 when the Sunday trading laws came in” means this day of transition is, in itself, in transition. “The whole concept of this book is not exactly to offer answers as to what everyone’s doing on a Sunday but to show snapshots of certain quarters of English society. But it’s more about posing the question are we living our lives a bit too quickly? Don’t we need, as humans, a day when we can pause?”
Each subject has their own Sunday to share. Wayne Brown, a New Testament Church of God pastor from Willesden Green, was caught by Writtle in a moment of reflection before a service, and laments the loss of Sunday traditions: “Consumerism is the new religion. We are so extreme about wanting things, a TV has become a yardstick by which we measure achievement. We worship at the church of Bluewater.”
Genna Preston, from Belgravia, has her own Sunday custom: Her father Paul brought the first McDonald’s franchise to the UK in 1974, in Woolwich. So as a homage the single mother takes her daughter Ella to McDonalds for breakfast every Sunday.
“I’m quite happy for Sundays to remain as they are. There is way more choice for people now. But I try to incorporate the added choices I have with spending it with my family.”
Writtle met many of his subjects through his job. Whilst working on the Evening Standard’s Dispossessed campaign, he was introduced to Barbara Harriot, from Deptford, who has 11 children by four fathers. For her, Sundays have always been special: “As soon as I got a little freedom, I just went out and ran. That’s all I remember.”
The book got by with a little help from his friends — a 30-day Crowdfunding campaign went “right to the wire”. His own perfect Sunday would be “a veggie fry-up with my wife and son”, then “heading out the back gate where we live in Chesham and out to the Chiltern Hills for a walk”. While this sounds idyllic, he says his work pulled the scales from his eyes, and Brexit has been an eye-opener.
“A massive amount of people in the British Isles are inclusive, but there are pockets where they aren’t, and that’s a