Under the Rainbow

As Britain entered lockdown in the spring of 2020; drawings; paintings and messages proliferated in its windows and gardens; signs of the human desire to communicate as face-to-face contact became impossible. When restrictions temporarily eased; writer James Attlee began ringing doorbells in his hometown of Oxford. On doorsteps and park benches; on council estates and among genteel terraces; he recorded the voices of those briefly emerging from isolation. He won the trust of rainbow painters and anti-vaxxers; a Covid nurse; an LGBTQ+ artist; a VE Day celebrator and Black Lives Matter protesters; as well as frontline workers in a bakery and a supermarket. Their words; Attlee's pithy observations and sixteen pages of his photographs make Under the Rainbow a unique record of an extraordinary year and a tribute to creativity and resilience.

James Attlee is the author of Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey; Guernica: Painting the End of the World; Station to Station; shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year 2017; Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight and Under the Rainbow: Voices from the First Lockdown; among other titles. His digital fiction The Cartographer's Confession won the New Media Writing Prize in 2018. He works as an editor; lecturer and publishing consultant and his journalism has appeared in many publications including Tate Etc.; The Independent; Frieze and London Review of Books.