Looking back on life in the COVID-19 pandemic, Hanzala Fayaz reflects on the silence, isolation and strange stillness that transformed Leicester into a city almost frozen in time
I’m a second-year university student now, but when the pandemic hit, I was still in Year 9, living in Leicester and trying to understand why my city suddenly felt like it had been switched off.
Before COVID, Leicester was loud. Busy. Always moving. Buses packed with commuters, students flooding out of cafés after school, families crowding the Highcross at weekends. It was normal to complain about the noise, the traffic, the queues. No-one ever imagined a time when we’d miss them.
Then lockdown happened, and Leicester became the first city in the country to be shut down locally.
I remember watching the announcement on the news and not really understanding what it meant. Local lockdown sounded temporary, like a snow day or a power cut. But when I went outside a few days later, it felt like my city had disappeared.
The streets were empty. Not “a bit quieter than usual”, just empty, properly empty. Granby Street looked like a Sunday morning every day of the week. Shops pulled their shutters down and taped notices to the glass. Cafés that used to smell like coffee and pastries smelled like nothing at all. The Clock Tower stood in the middle of the city like a statue nobody came to visit anymore.
As a Year 9 student, my whole world shrank to my bedroom. School moved online, which sounded exciting at first, until lessons turned into glitchy video calls and homework uploaded Microsoft Teams. My desk became my classroom. My bedroom became my world.
Days blurred into each other. Wake up. Log on. Log off. Repeat.
When I did go out, it was only for a walk or a food shop with my family. We queued outside supermarkets in the cold, standing on faded floor stickers that told us where to stand. Everyone wore masks. Nobody spoke. It felt like being in a dystopian film where everyone knew the rules but didn’t know when it would end.
Leicester stayed closed when other cities reopened – it ended up being locked down for longer than anywhere else in the country. That was the strangest part. We watched on social media as people in other parts of the country went back to restaurants and shops, while our local businesses stayed shut. Every reopening felt like a false start. Doors would unlock, then lock again weeks later. Hope kept getting cancelled.
At night, the city felt even quieter. No buses roaring past. No crowds heading for food after the cinema. Just streetlights reflecting off empty pavements and the hum of the occasional car passing through.
I remember standing at my bedroom window and looking out at the road. It felt like the world had paused, like someone had pressed a giant stop button on life.
But there were small moments of connection. Rainbows in windows. People clapping for NHS workers on Thursday nights. Neighbours smiling at each other on walks. It was the only time the city made noise again, just for a few minutes.
Now, walking through Leicester as a uni student, it’s hard to believe it was ever that quiet. The crowds are back. The buses are loud again. The cafés are full. But every now and then, I still remember what it looked like when my city went silent.
Leicester didn’t just change during COVID. It disappeared for a while.
And growing up in the middle of that silence is something I’ll never forget.
