The summer of 2018 was the hottest England had had in decades, and it coincided with a World Cup in which the national side went further than anyone expected. Waplington spent it a few streets from his house, at a stretch of the River Lea in east London where people swim from the bank as if it were the coast. He removed almost every clue that would fix the pictures in time or place: no phones, no logos, no skyline, just bodies in brown water, towels on grass, and the warm grain of an old camera. The result reads as a deliberately ambiguous document, and Waplington has described it as a metaphor for a country enjoying itself at a moment of political deadlock.