What do you think?
Rate this book
Under the Rainbow: Voices from Lockdown
Public symbolism meets private reflection: writer and urban explorer James Attlee reads the signs that appeared in windows and hears from artists, activists, frontline workers and more.
As the country entered lockdown in the spring of 2020, images and signs proliferated in windows, symptoms of the human desire to communicate as face-to-face contact became impossible. When restrictions temporarily eased, writer James Attlee began ringing doorbells in his hometown of Oxford. On doorsteps and park benches, on council estates and among genteel terraces, he recorded the voices of those briefly emerging from isolation.
He won the trust of rainbow painters and anti-vaxxers, a Covid nurse, an LGBTQ+ artist, a VE Day celebrator and Black Lives Matter protesters, as well as frontline workers in a bakery and a supermarket. Their words, Attlee’s pithy observations and 16 pages of his photographs make Under the Rainbow a unique record of an extraordinary year and a tribute to creativity and resilience.
As the country entered lockdown in the spring of 2020, images and signs proliferated in windows, symptoms of the human desire to communicate as face-to-face contact became impossible. When restrictions temporarily eased, writer James Attlee began ringing doorbells in his hometown of Oxford. On doorsteps and park benches, on council estates and among genteel terraces, he recorded the voices of those briefly emerging from isolation.
He won the trust of rainbow painters and anti-vaxxers, a Covid nurse, an LGBTQ+ artist, a VE Day celebrator and Black Lives Matter protesters, as well as frontline workers in a bakery and a supermarket. Their words, Attlee’s pithy observations and 16 pages of his photographs make Under the Rainbow a unique record of an extraordinary year and a tribute to creativity and resilience.
200 pages, Paperback
First published May 13, 2021
5 people are currently reading
24 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 24, 2021
At the height of the lockdown in 2020, the people of Britain turned to art, placing rainbow paintings in their windows to support the National Health Service. It is this phenomenon, which Attlee explores in Under the Rainbow: Voices from Lockdown. He canvases a range of views on the semiotics of the art, the significance of the Thursday evening NHS and key worker clapping sessions, the government’s response to the pandemic, and the social movements, which rose to the fore during this period - Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion.
Perhaps this is Attlee’s best book yet. It is immediate, emotional, profound and, like Isolarion, takes us back to the author’s roots as a local roving reporter, wearing out his shoe leather on the at once genteel and gritty streets of his hometown - Oxford, England. The reason why it is so effective is that it is told by the people. The narrator himself takes a backseat, while he meticulously transcribes and positions the words of his interlocutors into a coherent, insightful narrative.
True to his journalistic oath, Attlee gives fair voice to the anarchists, the anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy theorists, as much as to the traditionalists, the royalists, staunch defenders of the establishment and the system and everything in between. Whether the vox pop is denouncing the evils of crony capitalism or trying to make it Christmas all year round, it is treated fairly, equally and compassionately by the author.
The book consists substantially of quotes, which provide an invaluable archive, that could easily be adapted and updated for a new edition, when we are finally able to look back on this extraordinary period in the history of the United Kingdom, which very term had become contentious by the time the pandemic took over.
My only caveat is the casual placement of the text on the page, which is a little irritating. There are no speech marks - line-breaks and indented paragraphs replace them. It does look like poetry or a play, but in some places, it is hard to tell who is speaking without the helpful interjections, “she says”, “he says”, “I ask”, etc., which do not always appear, possibly down to editorial concerns with repetition. Still, this avant-garde approach to punctuation does make the prose look a bit like a work of art and it would be churlish to complain, when the publisher has done such a fine job of bringing out such a timely, insightful, balanced overview of the coronavirus pandemic while it is still going on
The author has been meticulous in compiling a diverse range of voices – a 5-year-old boy, a bilingual six-year-old, a 13-year-old climate activist, an artist, an academic, a landlady, a conspiracy theorist, a health professional, a 90-year-old care home resident – and, in so doing achieves a genuine representation of the world we live in today. Their disparate points of view demonstrate how far we have come in technological advancement, social and global movement over the last few years and the impact that has had on ordinary lives.
The author is a warm, thoughtful, sympathetic and humane listener. He genuinely tries his best throughout to engage with the madness, chaos, strife and division of the planet as represented in the microcosm of his hometown as well as the flipside – the stoicism, the solidarity, rationalism, and harmony borne out of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the outbreak of the disease. Amidst the social schism, the chattering voices from the streets and the proclamations, the message is weirdly uplifting.
Our media often presents a fractious, divided society in turmoil; opposing factions accusing each other of heinous wrongdoing; a society comprised of trolls, cyberbullies and keyboard warriors. The voices of the people, however, brought together under the rainbow roof of this healing book form a thread of reasonable dialogue. One has the impression, seeing all the differing opinions in print that, we only need to speak to each other to make the world a much more civilised place. Oh, and more writers like Attlee, of course.
Perhaps this is Attlee’s best book yet. It is immediate, emotional, profound and, like Isolarion, takes us back to the author’s roots as a local roving reporter, wearing out his shoe leather on the at once genteel and gritty streets of his hometown - Oxford, England. The reason why it is so effective is that it is told by the people. The narrator himself takes a backseat, while he meticulously transcribes and positions the words of his interlocutors into a coherent, insightful narrative.
True to his journalistic oath, Attlee gives fair voice to the anarchists, the anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy theorists, as much as to the traditionalists, the royalists, staunch defenders of the establishment and the system and everything in between. Whether the vox pop is denouncing the evils of crony capitalism or trying to make it Christmas all year round, it is treated fairly, equally and compassionately by the author.
The book consists substantially of quotes, which provide an invaluable archive, that could easily be adapted and updated for a new edition, when we are finally able to look back on this extraordinary period in the history of the United Kingdom, which very term had become contentious by the time the pandemic took over.
My only caveat is the casual placement of the text on the page, which is a little irritating. There are no speech marks - line-breaks and indented paragraphs replace them. It does look like poetry or a play, but in some places, it is hard to tell who is speaking without the helpful interjections, “she says”, “he says”, “I ask”, etc., which do not always appear, possibly down to editorial concerns with repetition. Still, this avant-garde approach to punctuation does make the prose look a bit like a work of art and it would be churlish to complain, when the publisher has done such a fine job of bringing out such a timely, insightful, balanced overview of the coronavirus pandemic while it is still going on
The author has been meticulous in compiling a diverse range of voices – a 5-year-old boy, a bilingual six-year-old, a 13-year-old climate activist, an artist, an academic, a landlady, a conspiracy theorist, a health professional, a 90-year-old care home resident – and, in so doing achieves a genuine representation of the world we live in today. Their disparate points of view demonstrate how far we have come in technological advancement, social and global movement over the last few years and the impact that has had on ordinary lives.
The author is a warm, thoughtful, sympathetic and humane listener. He genuinely tries his best throughout to engage with the madness, chaos, strife and division of the planet as represented in the microcosm of his hometown as well as the flipside – the stoicism, the solidarity, rationalism, and harmony borne out of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the outbreak of the disease. Amidst the social schism, the chattering voices from the streets and the proclamations, the message is weirdly uplifting.
Our media often presents a fractious, divided society in turmoil; opposing factions accusing each other of heinous wrongdoing; a society comprised of trolls, cyberbullies and keyboard warriors. The voices of the people, however, brought together under the rainbow roof of this healing book form a thread of reasonable dialogue. One has the impression, seeing all the differing opinions in print that, we only need to speak to each other to make the world a much more civilised place. Oh, and more writers like Attlee, of course.
May 19, 2021
Under The Rainbow is a collection of impromptus interviews conducted by James Attlee mostly of strangers on their doorstep or in the street during the brief relaxation of lockdown last summer and early autumn.
When this latest book from And Other Stories landed on my doormat I was prepared to find it “too soon” and not adding to all that I had already heard or read. But I was wrong. Instead I come away bowled over by the ‘wisdom of strangers’ and their eloquence in describing the kaleidoscope of their emotions generated by the pandemic: their pain, their anxiety, but also the tiny lights of new perspectives of the world and their hopes for it.
While Attlee’s own righteous angers and critiques are visible, they do not dominate, as he lets the voices of his interviewees do most of the talking.
As I write this, today I read Jenny McGee, the ICU nurse that cared for our PM when he caught COVID, has resigned “in disgust” at the treatment of nurses: she seems to embody the anger and frustration expressed by all the NHS staff interviewed by Attlee. It must be especially depressing for them to now see how the success over the vaccine rollout appears to have led everyone to forgive all the incompetence of last year - perhaps in our understandable desire to forget the whole dystopian year.
Nevertheless, having lost a friend in a care home and my mother in the past year, the person interviewed in chapter XIII certainly speaks for me too.
When this latest book from And Other Stories landed on my doormat I was prepared to find it “too soon” and not adding to all that I had already heard or read. But I was wrong. Instead I come away bowled over by the ‘wisdom of strangers’ and their eloquence in describing the kaleidoscope of their emotions generated by the pandemic: their pain, their anxiety, but also the tiny lights of new perspectives of the world and their hopes for it.
While Attlee’s own righteous angers and critiques are visible, they do not dominate, as he lets the voices of his interviewees do most of the talking.
As I write this, today I read Jenny McGee, the ICU nurse that cared for our PM when he caught COVID, has resigned “in disgust” at the treatment of nurses: she seems to embody the anger and frustration expressed by all the NHS staff interviewed by Attlee. It must be especially depressing for them to now see how the success over the vaccine rollout appears to have led everyone to forgive all the incompetence of last year - perhaps in our understandable desire to forget the whole dystopian year.
Nevertheless, having lost a friend in a care home and my mother in the past year, the person interviewed in chapter XIII certainly speaks for me too.
September 22, 2025
I got this as part of my year subscribing to And Other Stories.
This is a good and interesting book, however, it's not a real snapshot of the whole of the UK at that time. I mean this is made very clear, but he goes around Oxfordshire (somewhere like that anyway) which has a very particular type of person living there. It was also, like most parts of England, partially lifted during lockdown, whereas Manchester was not (believed to be a political choice by some, rather than a scientific one).
I know that covid will forever cement itself into the history books, however, this is one of those books that feel like a capsule of its time. I find that there's quite a bit of these, particularly in the political sector, which I don't really like to read as there is no longevity.
This is a good and interesting book, however, it's not a real snapshot of the whole of the UK at that time. I mean this is made very clear, but he goes around Oxfordshire (somewhere like that anyway) which has a very particular type of person living there. It was also, like most parts of England, partially lifted during lockdown, whereas Manchester was not (believed to be a political choice by some, rather than a scientific one).
I know that covid will forever cement itself into the history books, however, this is one of those books that feel like a capsule of its time. I find that there's quite a bit of these, particularly in the political sector, which I don't really like to read as there is no longevity.
July 2, 2021
A very interesting read (especially as I live in Oxford). I enjoyed 'hearing' the opinions and views of people following the first lockdown. Unfortunately I have had to give it only 3 stars because it is very subjective. Space is given generously to the people the author seems to agree with and they are heartily affirmed. On the other hand the views of those who appear (from the author's responses) to challenge his opinions are given short shrift. I found this disagreeable and irritating, maybe because I did not always agree with the author's opinions. They were not stated but I feel they come across clearly.
May 13, 2021
Incredibly timely, covering COVID, appropriation of the Stonewall flag, BLM, RhodesMustFall and Earth Day. Really accessible writing, based on informal interviews with the public.
If I had one quibble, I'm fairly sure he used the word 'sexuality' for gender identity. An editor should have corrected that, but I'm sure they were in a hurry to publish.
If I had one quibble, I'm fairly sure he used the word 'sexuality' for gender identity. An editor should have corrected that, but I'm sure they were in a hurry to publish.
June 2, 2021
This book really took me by surprise; grabbed me from the start. It starts a bit like How The Word Is Passed by Clint Smith, with interviews on toppling down monuments dedicated to enslavers. And it goes further into how the lockdown and the pandemic affected businesses and people, the appropriation of the rainbow in the UK as government propaganda erasing the struggles of the LGBTQIA community, and freedom of speech in a polarized world.
June 5, 2021
This is a book about the covid-19 lockdown in the UK, but also about so much more that plagues us all in this specific moment.
The writing is okay. But, this raises important issues we should all be considering and addressing.
The writing is okay. But, this raises important issues we should all be considering and addressing.
June 29, 2021
I absolutely judged this book by the cover and title (which I thought were kind of dumb) but ended up absolutely loving this book. Great formatting and cadence, with beautiful language and great conveyance of peoples’ stories.
November 15, 2021
Interesting book, with short conversations on lock-down, NHS, black lives matter, but mainly on life during the Covid pandemic.
December 29, 2021
i think this would be a really good reminder in a number of years on perspectives of the pandemic when we look. interesting read.
July 29, 2021
I received this book as part of a subscription to the publisher, And Other Stories.
I was apprehensive to read a book relating to Covid-19 and lockdown while we still haven't fully recoverd from this pandemic. Sadly, I was right to think so, as the book feels very unfinished. Perhaps all the author wanted was a snippet, a glimpse into the worldwide experience of 2020, but that wasn't enough for me.
Overall, the writing was good, but I wasn't happy with the formatting. There was no clear delineation in dialoge and the overabundance of outside quotes seemed superfluous and pretentious.
I was apprehensive to read a book relating to Covid-19 and lockdown while we still haven't fully recoverd from this pandemic. Sadly, I was right to think so, as the book feels very unfinished. Perhaps all the author wanted was a snippet, a glimpse into the worldwide experience of 2020, but that wasn't enough for me.
Overall, the writing was good, but I wasn't happy with the formatting. There was no clear delineation in dialoge and the overabundance of outside quotes seemed superfluous and pretentious.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews