How will future generations remember life in lockdown Britain?

Several new projects are chronicling the hopes and fears of Brits in lockdown in an attempt to capture the national mood and leave a record of life in the time of Coronavirus.

First up is ‘Covid-19 and Me’ being run by The Open University and The Young Foundation. Thousands of participants will contribute anonymous diary entries, interviews and questionnaire responses, which organisers say will create a “weather map of public feeling” as we navigate ourselves through this extraordinary time. The website says the diaries will help to shed light on how people are adapting to the crisis and will go on to form an “important digital archive of how the communities responded, valuable for future researchers and policy makers, as a record of a unique moment in time.”

Another project which is run by women’s rights charity, the Fawcett Society, aims to chronicle female experiences during the pandemic in their ‘Making Women Visible’ project. Women across the country are invited to share their experiences in weekly diary entries about how Coronavirus is impacting them. Participants have been recording everything from how the weather is affecting their motivation to the trials and tribulations of home-schooling to living at home with abusive partners. The resulting information will go on “to inform our campaigning and ensure that women are both visible and represented at the decision-making table,” their website says.

Meanwhile, social research organisation, Mass Observation, has also been collecting one day diaries this week to create a snapshot of the public mood against the backdrop of the ongoing health crisis. The Mass Observation archive housed at the University of Sussex is a treasure trove of extraordinary information about ordinary lives which was first set up at the beginning of 1937. The initial aim of the organisation, started by a disparate group of three young men (an anthropologist, a filmmaker and a poet and journalist), was to create “an anthropology of ourselves”.

Not long after the Mass Observation project began the country underwent another national crisis with the start of the second world war. Diaries from the time paint a unique picture of the views and feelings of ordinary citizens. Often they aren’t what you might expect. Whereas Churchill is now revered for his wartime leadership and “we’ll fight them on the beaches” rhetoric, the archive reveals not everyone was impressed at the time. On hearing one victory speech by Churchill, the aunt of a diarist remarked: “He’s no speaker, is he?” Other participants recorded their dreams, revealing anxieties about the ongoing war and what might unfold. It’s these intimate details captured by the qualitative research methods that makes the archive so special, providing a window into thoughts and experiences which would otherwise be lost. And it’s these unique viewpoints and experiences in real time that the new diary projects hope to tap into, as the nation navigates another crisis affecting us all.

They say journalists write the first draft of history, but underneath those singular dominant narratives lies the multiple, complex experiences of ordinary people muddling through and getting to grips with often extraordinary experiences. These three projects will act like a giant time capsule of the nation under the strain of Coronavirus, capturing the complex views in all their human messiness, at a particularly difficult moment in time.