Submitted by: Sarah Jewett
Date: 30 May 2020
Location: Sainsbury's (now closed), 71 High Holborn

I was walking for exercise around London from Rosebery Hall towards LSE in late May and was struck by this graffiti mural by Bowen and Blackmore (London street artists) on the boarded up Sainsbury's close to campus. It marked a point in the pandemic in which many sought to highlight the importance of key workers just about two months after the lockdown began and restrictions were soon to be eased up a bit. The woman in the photo was one of very few people I came across.

Submitted by: Grace Oswald
Date: February 2021
Location: Queen's Hospital, Romford

I usually work part time as a Healthcare Assistant in the Emergency Department. This photo was taken during my first ITU shift earlier this year- it was a night shift and I was already nervous to be working in a new area. I had the fright of my life (and actually screamed) when I switched on the light in the store room and found this disfigured hospital training doll. It was very funny and certainly made my new team laugh. I think it has now become a running joke to play on new staff- she seems to pop up everywhere!

Submitted by: Richard Collings
Date: 2020-2021

We wanted to capture photos of our staff during the pandemic, both at work and play. The photos were taken of staff working in the library and at home. It also showed colleagues travelling, being on holiday and spending quality time with their families. We believed that bringing these photographs together could help to capture some of the significant changes in our daily lives and outlook during lock down. We also thought that putting these pictures together to make a typical day would make an interesting presentation. We had a enthusiastic response, lots of photos were sent in and we made sure we used them all. We then created some music that we thought would fit the style of the presentation.

Submitted by: Beatriz Tiago Fernandes Marques Da Silva
Date: March 2021
Location: At home in London

Grimshaw [LSE's oldest student society, supported by the International Relations Department but open to students of any subject with an interest in international affairs] held an online event on the Western Sahara conflict on the 5th of March with three speakers. The event was very popular and an opportunity to continue to host insightful conversations within our community at LSE despite the pandemic.

Submitted by: Beatriz Tiago Fernandes Marques Da Silva
Date: 31 March 2021
Location: LSE Library

Despite the academic year having been incredibly difficult for our student newspaper The Beaver, the features team still met every week to share our ideas for articles and enjoy some time venting about how busy our week had been so far. Our last meeting felt bittersweet as some of our friends in the team were graduating soon without us having properly hang out in person all together. I still could not be prouder of our team effort. We made memories over Zoom that won't be easily forgotten.

Submitted by: Deborah Challis
Date: January-April 2021

These posters are based on the responses to a survey of children at a Primary School as part of the LSE Festival 2021. The children were asked for their experiences and feelings around COVID-19 and related restrictions and then turned into infographics by artist Becci Kenning.

Submitted by: Kendra Mills
Date: 7 April 2020
Location: Southwark park, London

These photos were takenon one of my first walks out of strict quarantine. I was struck by the buoyancy of spring.

Submitted by: Nicola Scally
Date: 19 March 2020
Location: LSE Library

A picture of me shelving just before lockdown one. It was taken by Clive Wilson on 19 March 2020.

Submitted by: Qiuyan Chen
Date: 14 March 2021
Location: Gay village, Manchester

To celebrate my birthday, we went to Manchester during the pandemic. The first thing we did was to take photos in the gay village. There were so many rainbows, loved it! There were very few people and the shops weren't open. But as long as I can be with my girlfriend, I am the happiest person!

Submitted by: Kathie Nissan
Date: c2020

My office has been the spare room since March 2020 and I have had to implement some rules.

Submitted by: Qiuyan Chen
Date: 26 August 2021
Location: Glass House Brick Lane, London

I curated the community-focused Queer Chinese Art Festival with Jamie in August 2021. We hope to amplify the voices of emerging Chinese queer talents especially under the pressure of Covid-19. At the bottom right is the Art Festival poster. You can also see a photo of two women kissing in the street. This is me and my handsome girlfriend!

Submitted by: Sarah Jewett
Date: 1 August 2020
Location:John Carpenter Street, Victoria Embankment

Throughout the pandemic, the sculpture Taxi! by Seward Johnson Jr (1983) managed to stay mask free aside for a random day in August, thanks to a passerby with a sense of humor.

Submitted by: Megha Chand
Date: May 2020
Location: At home in Kathmandu, Nepal

The Himalayas have been a significant part of my parents lives. They are not mountain climbers or geologists; they were simply lucky enough to have seen the mountains in all their glory without even leaving Kathmandu. Before the early 2000s, any person in Kathmandu could peep out their window and see the Himalayan mountains: snow-peaked and awe-inspiring. However, in my lifetime, I do not remember ever witnessing such magnificence from my home - the mountains were never visible as they were constantly shrouded in smog.

Then, in May 2020, Nepal went into lockdown. My parents and I were unable to meet my grandparents, who required our support. We were all reckoning with the pandemic's impact on Nepal and the wider world.

Yet, as the pollution levels drastically decreased, I was finally able to experience the beauty etched into the minds of my parents. The mountains surrounded me with all their splendor. Needless to say, a photo cannot capture the grandeur of the Himalayas. However, this photo serves as a reminder of their beauty, which inspired me in times of adversity.

Submitted by: Devika Hovell
Date: July 2020
Location: At home in Australia

This photo was taken by my husband after we relocated to Australia and will always remind me of the challenge of writing during Covid. Due to home-schooling and nurseries being closed from time to time, pushing ahead with writing projects was often done in the company of children...who were not always entirely respectful of the tools of the research trade!

Submitted by: Dana Ramadan
Date: March 2021
Location: LSE Centre Building

This photo was taken by my course mate at 9pm, in an almost-empty campus. We were debating whether to go home or continue studying.

Submitted by: Dana Ramadan
Date: February 2021
Location: LSE Centre Building

I was studying on campus and took a break to call my little sister in Lebanon, who often turns the camera to our cat so that I can "speak" to him.

Submitted by: Dana Ramadan
Date: February 2021
Location: In my kitchen, in my London shared flat in Islington

I finally found the time to start bulk shopping after discovering my local zero-waste stores.

Submitted by: Dana Ramadan
Date: February 2021
Location: In my room in Islington, London

While everyone went out to enjoy the first snow day in London, I decided to stay in my bed and watch the snow fall outside my window. The photo captures the moment I was having breakfast and doing some readings.

Submitted by: Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey
Date: May-August 2020

During Britain's first Covid lockdown in spring/early summer 2020, the Government Department launched a project to communicate some of the research that we were conducting on responses to Covid by various countries. Even as we were all working from home, we put together this film, which explores the emergency powers that governments were using to control the spread of coronavirus, and how the relationship between the people and their governments had fundamentally changed.

"CV-19: A Film by the Department of Government" highlights research being carried out into the impact and consequences of these changing relationships. The film explores the threat to liberal democratic norms, public support for an authoritarian government response, how governments are being held accountable, what the effects are on public transport and a new digital frontier for political campaigning.

As a measure of the interest in this film, the contributors held a roundtable discussion (over Zoom) in November 2020, and this is also available online. More broadly, the film has achieved remarkable success in film festival competitions. As of July 2021, and from international film festivals in 13 countries, the film has received 16 top awards (Best Short Documentary, Best Health Film, Best Edited Film, Best Web an New Media, etc), as well as 3 finalist positions, 2 semi-finalist positions, 13 official selections and 2 honorable mentions.

Submitted by: Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey
Date: Autumn 2019-January 2021

This book began in autumn 2019, and continued throughout the Covid pandemic. It is being published by Ubiquity Press, as an open-source book, with a publication date of about 1st October 2021. It was meant to be part of the School's 125th anniversary celebration and is the first ever history of the LSE Government Department.

The contributors include students at all levels (undergraduate, masters, doctoral), working together with Gordon Bannerman (a British historian who previously studied at LSE) and Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey as Head of the Department. Moreover, we wanted to ensure that different perspectives were heard and so along with archival research, we included dozens of interviews with current and former academics, PSS staff, students and alumni. We wanted the history to have many voices, and I think that we have achieved that.

Completing this during Covid posed many challenges. First, we had only two months to conduct the in-person archival work in the library before the first lockdown hit. This posed a major challenge as it made access to the historical archives impossible. Fortunately, the research that had been done, together with on-line research, allowed us to move forward.

A second challenge was that we were all working from various parts of the worldCanada, Kenya, Lebanon, Poland, and different parts of the UK! So, just keeping the focus and momentum going as the pandemic raged throughout the world was quite the task. Somehow, each of us managed to bring our contributions to the volume at different times, as we were each facing our own Covid-related disruptions along the way.

A third challenge was obtaining the interviews as the turmoil of Covid took hold. Here, Skype, Zoom and phone calls made the interviews possible, and in some cases, were more convenient than in-person interviews. The real difficulty was that in spring of 2020, many interviewees were difficult to contact, given the on-going turmoil in everyones lives. But the fact that so many interviewees were willing to take the time for us is a real testament to the strength of feeling that many have towards the Department and the School more generally.

The book itself traces the emergence and evolution of the LSE Government Department from 1895 to 2020, focusing on the personalities that guided the development of the Department, the social and political contexts the Department existed within, its research agenda and course structure, and the location of the Department in British politics. It also charts the evolution of the discipline of political science in Britain itself. The volume is divided chronologically into four chapters, each covering roughly similar time periods in the Departments history and focuses on the events that shaped it: personalities, events, and location. Key themes are the development of political science in Britain, the impact of location on the LSE Government Department, the professionalisation of academia in Britain, and the microcosm the Department presents of British political life during each time period. The conflicts between progressive and conservative forces are a recurring theme which helps link the internal dynamics of the Department with the wider social and political contexts that occurred from the beginning of the School to its 125th anniversary.

Submitted by: Grammateia Kotsialou
Date: May 2020
Location: Gunnersbury Park, London

The lockdown period awakened a creative part of me, a passion for photography. During a lockdown 'exercise' walk with my husband, I saw this spot and tried to capture as much as possible of this beauty.

Submitted by: Rachael Maguire
Date: February 2021 and April 2021
Location: Near Lincoln's Inn Fields

I had to go into the dentist and took the photos to show colleagues how the Marshall Building was progressing.

Submitted by: Avanes Khachaturov
Date: 17 March 2021
Location: Red Lion Square, London

With physical lectures being cancelled and all classes moving online by December 2020, I found that I had much more time to explore lunch options around campus. Before, my typical day involved rushing from one lecture hall or classroom to another, with studying in the Library in between, and hence I was limited by how far from campus I could venture out.

Most of the fast causal restaurants dotting Kingsway that specialized in providing food were closed the previous year, with primarily coffee chains remaining open for take away, offering only small sandwiches and toasties as lunch options. On the other hand, Lamb's Conduit Passage and Red Lion Street, which runs parallel to Red Lion Square, offered many small and cheap eateries of various cuisines, from Korean to Malaysian to British classics, which I only found the time to try out now that all of my studies were online and not tied to campus.

The picture taken was during one such lunch time, a relatively warm day for the weather that month, with the benches lining the park offering excellent places to sit back, enjoy a warm meal, and either listen to music or a podcast, or to just take in the sounds around you.

Submitted by: Aarti Malhotra
Date: 14 June 2021

Went vinyl shopping! Trying to explore our area post-lockdown!

Submitted by: Ruiqi Li
Date: November 2020
Location: On the way to campus from Bankside House [LSE halls of residence]

I was on the way to school with a few friends from Bankside; it was one of the first in person classes we had. Having just arrived in London and as international students coming from different places, we were eager to retain everything we see in the city in our minds. Autumn is slightly chilly and the streets were rather empty because of the pandemic, but it was a unique memory that felt strangely cozy and poetic amongst the chaos happening elsewhere in the backdrop.

Submitted by: Mhairi Gowans
Date: 28 February 2021

In February [2021], once the government announced it would be starting vaccination for Group 6, charities became aware that the Government had taken many clinically vulnerable people off the vaccination list. This particularly affected asthmatics of whom millions had been off-boarded from priority.

A patient group formed on Facebook and then launched several Twitter events to raise awareness of this issue. This graphic pertained to the second event which I promoted on my Instagram account on the 28th of February. Each Twitter event resulted in the chosen hashtag trending (first hashtag was #AsthmaticsAtRisk, second hashtag was #VaccinesforAsthmatics. #flujabequalscovidjab and #asthmaticsunder50 were also later used).

Unfortunately while this received some press attention and celebrity support from Supernanny Jo Frost, as well as charity support from the Asthma and Allergy Foundation and the Association of Respiratory Nurse Specialists, this issue has been largely ignored by the government leaving clinically vulnerable people vulnerable as society opens up.

Submitted by: Aarti Malhotra
Date: 11 March 2021
Location: LSE Rosebery Hall, London

With the hairdressers being closed, improvisation was key!

Personal author: Icharia, Beatrice

1993 - graduation day