Photographer Nick Bannehr is proud to announce the release of Real Football, a limited-edition photobook documenting one of Britain’s oldest and most ferocious sporting traditions: the medieval football match of Chiddingstone. The project will debut at BTWNLNS, 105 Wilson St, Newtown NSW 2042 on May 1, 2025, from 6 PM, offering the first chance to experience the work in person.

Played every Good Friday in the English village of Chiddingstone, this ungoverned match pits two teams of 200 players against one another in a four-hour battle across open fields, country roads, and riverbanks. With few rules and goals over a mile apart, it’s more than a game – it’s a ritual of endurance, community, and chaos.

“I discovered Real Football while researching British traditions in a bid to better understand the contemporary culture I was living in at the time”, Bannehr explains.
“These games only happen once a year in a few scattered towns in the UK, and yet they’ve survived for centuries. That mix of ancient custom and raw physicality is what pulled me in straight away”.

Shot in Bannehr’s instinctive, cinematic style, the work captures the scrums, the stillness, the sudden eruptions of movement and emotion. “The tone of the work emerged naturally. I wasn’t a bystander—I ran with the players, chased the ball through muddy paddocks and over stone fences. At one point I even had to push the ball aside to avoid becoming part of the game. I wanted to sit in the energy source and point my camera at it as it simmered around me”.

At its heart, Real Football is a meditation on tradition and the strange, essential human need to escape. “For a few hours, the modern world fades away. There are no screens, no structure—just instinct, mud, and the collective release of doing something real together”. The photobook is presented as a 68-page, singer sewn softcover, featuring a removable dust jacket that doubles as a poster. It’s published in an edition of 100 copies, self-published in London, UK.