It was a moment unprecedented in British history. Five years ago this weekend, as the then novel Covid-19 virus threatened to overwhelm UK hospitals, the entire country was placed into lockdown.
Nothing like it had ever happened before. Shops, schools, pubs, restaurants, nurseries, gyms, libraries, museums and leisure centres were all shut down, with Britons ordered to stay at home. Police were granted powers to fine anyone caught outside without good reason.
The action was taken to slow an illness that was both deadly and little understood. The expert consensus today is that, in those aims, it worked.
Yet there is no doubt the lockdown itself irrevocably changed society in ways that were never predicted.
From ongoing issues around children’s mental health and poor school attendance to a seismic shift in the way we work – and a rise in pandemic pets – not a single person in the country has been left unaffected by that surreal period.
We are all, in many ways, living in a post-Covid matrix.
Which brings us to Lydgate Hall Crescent, a suburban 40-house road in Sheffield where residents include doctors, builders, teachers and Tesco workers. Exactly 100 days into the coronavirus crisis – and then again a year later – The Independent visited this most average of English streets to speak to people there. They offered a snapshot of how the pandemic had upended normal life in the UK.
Today, five years on, we return and ask for their reflections.
‘There are a lot of kids out there that are still struggling, even now’
For Lee and Nina Churchus, one of the most surreal things about the pandemic was – now let’s see here – doing the weekly shop.
With six children then aged four to 20, the couple had to go big on lockdown groceries. “I remember putting five or six milks in my trolley and an assistant saying, ‘You’re not allowed to bulk buy,’” says house-husband Lee today. “I said, ‘I’m not – this is just to get us through the weekend.’”
He thinks about this. “Remember the toilet paper shortage?” the 51-year-old deadpans. “That was just by me doing the weekly shop.”
Thus come tales, thick and fast, of life in lockdown when there are eight of you under one family roof.
“It was hard,” says Nina, 46 and a teacher. “Everyone was trying to figure it out as they went along.”
As well as big shops, home educating and making gift packs for local key workers, the family organised the street’s WhatsApp group – which is still used to this day. “It’s pretty amazing,” says Lee. “It came about because of this major emergency but now people use it to ask for tips on window cleaners. I think it has added to the sense of community on the street.”
If there have been long-term positives to draw from the pandemic, though, there have also been negative consequences.
The pair are sure the lockdowns impacted the mental health of their children. Lee adds: “I think we underestimate how difficult being at home for all those weeks was on young people. There are a lot of kids out there still struggling, and a lot of parents still trying to help them get through that, even now.”
‘Things got done at a speed I’d never known before’
Few people saw the pandemic with quite the degree of proximity which Dr Tim Meekings did: he was lead consultant for critical care at Chesterfield Royal Hospital at the time.
Dozens of people died in his intensive care wards. In one agonising moment, the 50-year-old had to sit with a dying man whose family were not allowed to be there because they had also tested positive for the virus.
“There are moments that stay with you,” he says. “And that’s one of them.”
Yet despite everything, his overwhelming sense today is of an NHS that – in dire and unprecedented circumstances – was able to step up.
“Things got done at a speed I’d never known before,” the father of three says. “We were asking for things – PPE as an example – and they were arriving immediately. There was research being done with our patients at a pace I didn’t know was possible. And the rollout of the vaccination was a godsend.”
Certain improvements made in the white heat of that period remain in place today, he says – and have led to an improved health service in some respects.
So his hospital, for instance, is now part of a critical care network which allows localised patient surges to be shared around other nearby facilities. “There’s no doubt in my mind we are now better at dealing with sudden pressure points because of establishing those mechanisms during Covid,” he says. “That’s a real positive.”
All the same, he worries about his beloved NHS.
“It was remarkable at responding to a crisis,” he says. “But in less acute, more day-to-day situations, have we now got the best service possible? I’m not so sure.”
‘I spent more time with my family – and that’s carried on ever since’
Will Wraith says he will always look back at his time at university with a certain regret.
He was midway through his second year – in a physical education and school sport degree at Sheffield Hallam University – when the pandemic hit. Lectures were put online, he moved back home, and socialising with friends became something he did through a PlayStation.
“Academically everything was okay,” the 27-year-old says today. “I got a 2:1, which is what I was hoping for. But in terms of that full uni experience – I don’t think we got it. That third year was just wiped out, really.”
His great-grandmother died during the pandemic with no one by her side, and his family suffered from the virus first hand. Father Jeremy – as fit as a fiddle previously – caught Covid and, almost immediately after, was diagnosed with COPD, an incurable lung condition.
Nonetheless, the Wraiths – that’s Will and 24-year-old brother Oli, as well as Jeremy and mother Claire – have managed to take a lot of positives from the period.
“We spent more time as a family than we ever had done before,” says Will, who is now a secondary school PE teacher. “Just playing games, eating together, being in the garden. That’s definitely something that’s carried on ever since.”
Claire, 53, and Jeremy, 54, meanwhile, now work from home full-time in insurance, something which they say has hugely boosted their quality of life. Jeremy used the time when he would have been commuting to build a small bar at the bottom of the garden. They got a dog – Daisy – they’d longed to have for years.
“I think we were very fortunate,” says Claire. “In a lot of ways, it changed our life for the better.”
‘It was a bit of a war effort’
Sue Parkin still remembers that first walk to work after lockdown had been announced. “You didn’t need to look crossing the roads,” she says today. “The quiet. I’d never known the world like it.”
The 66-year-old is a Tesco assistant and – even though husband Garry’s diabetes made him vulnerable to the virus – she carried on working through the pandemic. “Our view was you roll your sleeves up and you get on with it,” says the grandmother-of-six. “If everyone stayed at home, where would the world be? It was a bit of a war effort, I suppose.”
She knew she’d made the right decision to keep working when it became clear who was using the little store most. “Older people,” she says. “A lot of younger people moved their shopping online but those who aren’t of that generation still liked to come in. Those 10 minutes buying their milk or bread were often the only real interactions they had.”
The toughest aspect of the pandemic, she says, was not being able to see her grandchildren – now aged four to 21. Previously, they’d looked after them a couple of times a week.
“That had to stop,” she says. “And our daughter was pregnant. We couldn’t be there for her in quite the way we’d have liked.”
All the same, there is one thing Sue is thankful for.
In 2022, Garry was diagnosed with cancer. He died just eight weeks later, aged only 60. “We’d always spent a lot of time together,” says Sue. “We were very good friends. But we had a lot of laughs at home together during those lockdowns. I’ll always have those memories.”
‘I kept thinking, have I made enough memories?’
The one lesson Dr Yaser Wahid took from the pandemic was that you never know what’s around the corner: it made him determined to grasp life for all it had to offer.
“I saw a lot of people dying,” the 34-year-old says today. “I had loved ones I lost; and friends – the same age as me, a lad I played football with – in intensive care. And it made me realise none of us are immortal. I kept thinking: if something should happen, have I made enough memories?”
The result was, he says, a shift in his perspectives and priorities.
As a new pandemic father – his eldest child, Haadi, was born during the first lockdown – he promised himself he would be a very present father, while he and his wife Salihah, a 35-year-old physician’s associate, decided they would pursue their desire to see more of the world.
The family – Yas, Salihah and Haadi as well as two-year-old Zaki – have since been to Istanbul, across the Middle East and to the Andalucia region of Spain on multiple occasions. They love walking in the mountains there.
“Before Covid, I was the kind of person who would have put those things off, said we could do them when we were older,” says Yas. “But you don’t know, do you? What if I don’t get to be older? I wanted to live more in the now.”
As a doctor, meanwhile, he has moved from general care at Doncaster Royal Infirmary to specialising in cancer treatments at Sheffield’s Weston Park Hospital. He is set to become a consultant later in the year.
Because there’s one thing Covid didn’t change for him: his desire to be on the front line of medical care. “Helping people is what I love,” he says. “The pandemic only affirmed that for me.”
