Striking image of Sheffield city centre pub in lockdown is added to national archive

Tim Dennell, aged 63, documented the Covid-19 pandemic through a series of over 1700 photographs, one of which was added to the Historic England archive.

The photograph, taken on 29 March 2020, showed the famous Sheffield pub the Frog and Parrot on Division Street boarded up with plywood bearing slogans in support of key workers and the NHS.

Tim said: “It struck me as that image sums up where we are - our lives are in the hands of medical professionals. It still sums up the lockdown for me.

"It’s a nice feeling to have your work recognised - it’s not necessarily a technically skilled photograph but it is a striking image. Frog and Parrot did a great job with the shutters.

“They didn’t have any idea what might happen. A lot of shopkeepers were worried, there was the possibility of people taking advantage of lockdown to break in."

Tim works in financial services but has had an interest in photography for most of his life and always carries a camera with him.

He added: “We drifted into lockdown before we realised we needed a lockdown. It was so fast, it happened over a couple of weeks. If you look back now on 2021 all the signs have disappeared and it’s almost as if it never happened. I think it is important to try and document it. Photos will record for the future that this happened.

"The first lockdown is probably going to be most people’s memory of the pandemic. The city was deserted, there was a lot of anxiety, a lot of people were very scared.

“I made an effort to go out for exercise and my own wellbeing, I didn’t like the feeling of being imprisoned in my own home. I carried a camera, it gave me some sense of purpose.

Tim made his pandemic photographs available to use under a Creative Commons license because he thought the media and bloggers might be short on images.

He is continuing to document the pandemic through photographs as he says the future is still uncertain even if restrictions have been lifted for now.