Nathan McGill’s Wicket documents Bradford women’s cricket under RPS bursary

Photographer Nathan McGill, supported by the Royal Photographic Society’s Eamonn McCabe bursary programme, produced Wicket, a photo essay documenting women’s cricket across Bradford published on 15 August 2026. The work concentrates on Bradford Park Avenue Ladies Cricket Club and combines analogue portraits with interviews to explore participation and community.

Interest in women’s cricket is expanding across the country, with attendance and viewing figures for this year’s Women’s T20 World Cup in England reaching an all-time high. A recent Test at Lord’s set a new attendance record for a women’s Test match, and this month’s Hundred fixture between London Spirit and Southern Brave established a new record for attendance at a women’s group game. Despite those audience gains, visual culture has lagged behind and historic archives remain sparse. Wicket is presented as part of a growing contemporary record that addresses that archival gap.

The project is described as rooted in relationships and place, foregrounding the social dimensions of the sport. McGill places women and girls at the centre of his narrative, producing images that emphasize participation, belonging, camaraderie and community. What emerged from his work was a close and extended engagement with one club: Bradford Park Avenue Ladies Cricket Club.

Bradford Park Avenue Ladies appears in the project as a visibly diverse, intergenerational team. McGill’s material presents players whose lives are shaped by a range of lived experiences. The essay positions that local diversity as reflective of Bradford’s social fabric while noting similar portrayals remain largely absent from mainstream cricket imagery.

The portraits in Wicket were shot on analogue medium format film using Kodak Portra stock, and the published images form only part of the wider project. Alongside the photographs, interviews with players recur throughout the work. In those conversations, cricket is rarely discussed solely as a sport and is described by participants as confidence, friendship, identity and purpose.

Wicket invites viewers to reconsider cricket not as spectacle but as community, memory and identity. The project frames the sport as a space where women and girls are moving from the margins into more visible roles.