In 2018, the photographer Martin Amis started working on a project about the effects of Brexit on his native Kent – “a sort of wander around this desolate landscape where nothing worked and everything was broken”, is how he initially conceived it.
Straight away, Amis (no relation to the novelist of the same name) began to notice a preponderance of “really sad-looking closed shops” at the edges of his local towns. “I thought: oh yeah, we’ll have a few of those in,” he recalls. “Then I started shooting more and more.” There were so many shut-down newsagents and florists, pubs and Chinese restaurants, bookshops and bookies, their windows boarded up or whited out or plastered with circus ads, that eventually Amis realised a whole different project was needed to accommodate them all.
