5 4 Letter fromHannah to Imelia, aged 9, March 2020 Introduction Has there ever been an event which touched the lives of everyone around the world in some way? The COVID-19 pandemic certainly did. Reports of the ‘Coronavirus’ began in Autumn 2019, centred around Wuhan, China; when it spread rapidly and appeared in other countries, a global pandemic was announced and here in the UK, after days of panic buying leading to empty supermarket shelves, by the end of March 2020, we had gone into lockdown. Only essential businesses, and schools for the children of key workers, remained open; the rest of the country locked down and began to work and study from home, only leaving to exercise or shop. A collective situation of this sort produced collective experiences; internet speed problems, shortage of flour, fear of the unknown, and complete separation of families and friends. It was also full of individual feelings and experiences as all of us continued our lives through lockdown. Over the next two years the grip of COVID-19 would rise and fall in waves, with parts of Aldershot being among the hardest hit in the UK, and lockdown restrictions would be strengthened or weakened accordingly until they were lifted completely. What was this period like for ordinary people? The Conversations with Aldershot project began in Autumn 2020 with Susan Merrick and Candice Camacho and developed into a project collecting lockdown experiences. The first phase saw a group of Aldershot women from diverse backgrounds join together to share their stories and explore visual arts through a series of Zoom calls; this culminated in an exhibition at the West End Centre in September 2021, in which these lockdown experiences were showcased through photography, poetry and film. The second phase of the project saw the group hold a series of engagement sessions across 2022 to collect the thoughts, both
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