It all began in 2016 when Lucy Ireland Gray was standing outside her local Sainsbury’s in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire. “I spotted a scrap of paper on the pavement with an eye doodled on it,” she says. “Then I realised there were two sets of handwriting on it – someone had reused an envelope to make their shopping list. I became intrigued. Soon I started finding shopping lists all over the place.”
Gray has been picking up discarded shopping lists in her home town and beyond ever since. Friends and family soon started sending her lists, found around the UK. She has amassed almost 300 and is now curating an exhibition of these quirky, quotidian glimpses into strangers’ lives.
