COVID-19 - Historical Stock Footage and Images
A huge collection of stock footage captured during the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic, from the early stages of 2020 with its lockdowns and deserted cities, continuing over the next year or so with supermarket queues, people wearing masks and testing and vaccination centres.
31 clips | 7 minutes 24 seconds runtime | 3.8GB
Captured during the height of the UK’s first COVID-19 lockdown in April 2020, this stock video pack offers a rare and unique glimpse into the surreal shopping circumstances brought about by the coronavirus pandemic. These clips are a visual time capsule, preserving the extraordinary impact of the pandemic on everyday life in England.
Footage Includes:
Supermarket Queues:
Gimbal shots of people standing 2 metres apart in long queues outside Tesco, ASDA, Sainsbury's, B&M, Screwfix, and ALDI.
A panning timelapse of a winding queue outside an ASDA supermarket, showing the surreal length of waiting lines.
Panic Buying Aftermath:
Empty supermarket shelves, showcasing the effects of panic buying on essentials like toilet paper, pasta, and canned goods.
Shopping basket shots depicting barren shelves and limited supplies.
Disinfecting and Hygiene Measures:
ALDI worker meticulously wiping down shopping trolleys with disinfectant and handing them to customers to maintain hygiene.
Covid-19 Testing:
Timelapse clips of a SARS-CoV-2 Antigen Rapid Test, including a dramatic shot of one test turning positive.
This footage captures the stark reality of shopping during the COVID-19 lockdown, documenting social distancing practices, panic buying, and hygiene protocols. These unique visuals are an important historical record of life in England during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Perfect for Documentaries, News Features, and Historical Archives
This collection is ideal for filmmakers, editors, and producers looking to illustrate the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on daily life. Whether you're producing a documentary, a news feature, or a historical archive, these rare clips offer authentic and cinematic visuals of a time that shaped our world.
Licensing Information
The footage is covered by a wide-use license with no maximum circulation limit, giving you the freedom to use it in projects of any size or reach. For full details, please refer to my terms and conditions.
Why Choose This Pack?
As a professional videographer, I’ve carefully curated this collection to provide you with high-quality, historically significant footage. These clips are rare, authentic, and cinematic, making them an invaluable resource for anyone looking to tell the story of the Covid-19 pandemic in a compelling way.
Bring the story of the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown to life with Clip Pack #39 - Covid 19 Pandemic Shopping Stock Video Footage.
A stunning and rare collection of 83 high-quality stock video clips, totaling 21 minutes and 18 seconds of footage (8.52GB), capturing a surreal moment in history: Birmingham's empty city streets during the first Covid-19 lockdown in April 2020.
An Unbelievable Scene
Birmingham, one of the UK’s busiest cities, transformed into an empty, eerie landscape. Ordinarily bustling locations such as:
Library of Birmingham
Bullring Shopping Centre
Grand Central Railway Station
China Town and The Arcadian Centre
St. Philip’s Cathedral
Centenary Square
are seen completely deserted, a sight that will never be witnessed again. From the daylight calm to the dusky golden hour and into the quiet, glowing streets at night, this footage offers an unparalleled and haunting glimpse into a city paused in time.
Footage Highlights
This pack includes:
Empty streets and cityscapes with only the occasional masked pedestrian, highlighting the unprecedented quiet.
Iconic landmarks and locations, normally teeming with life, in stunning stillness.
Daytime, dusk, and night sequences to cover a range of moods and atmospheres.
Smooth gimbal shots that glide through Birmingham’s streets, creating an unsettlingly surreal tone.
Why This Footage is Essential
This rare video collection is a valuable asset for producers, filmmakers, and content creators. Whether you're producing a documentary, TV drama, historical feature on the Covid-19 pandemic, or news coverage, these clips offer a unique visual record of an extraordinary time in history.
Licensing
The footage comes with a wide-use license and no maximum circulation limit, making it suitable for projects of any scale. Full details can be found in my terms and conditions.
A Unique Perspective
As a professional videographer, my focus is on capturing the extraordinary, and this pack embodies that mission. These clips showcase a once-in-a-lifetime moment when Birmingham, a city known for its vibrancy, stood still. This collection is as much an artistic achievement as it is a historical document.
Discover the power of these surreal visuals and bring a unique perspective to your next production.
Below is an overview of some of the content I have available for use, for anything from documentaries to news. It’s available in high-quality 4K UHD with often both editorial and commercial licenses and various levels of indemnity.
COVID-19 Stock Footage
This incredible low aerial reveal of the Royal Liver Building in Liverpool passes a COVID-19 Vaccination Hub. LINK
A coronavirus lateral flow test turning positive, these are available in video and timelapse.
Illegal graffiti appeared on a derelict building with ISOLATION painted onto a devil’s face.
The empty and deserted streets of Birmingham city centre during the covid lockdowns. There are lots of cities and towns with empty streets in the Covid Collection, Manchester, London, Birmingham, Burnley, Shrewsbury, Dudley, West Bromwich and many more. LINK
I even captured some in Tokyo, Japan. Busy streets full of people wearing face masks outside.
And trains and stations full of people, quietly and considerately wearing their face coverings.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, some of our tourist destinations were overwhelmed with visitors. Here’s an aerial video of Snowdon mountain, its summit crowded and with people queueing to reach it.
These scenes caused a fuss with some of the locals near some of our beauty spots, but were welcomed by others, as they gave a much-needed boost to our local communities and economy. It was great to see people getting a dose of fresh air.
Easy Jet planes sat idle on the runway at Gatwick Airport, as government restrictions made travel incredibly difficult for most.
Homeowners took it upon themselves to erect signs asking passers-by to stick to government and NHS guidelines.
Pubs and parks, governments and councils, decided to remove the possibility of sitting outdoors on a bench…
Cities like Birmingham continued to operate, but the mostly deserted streets became surreal places to film. Like something out of I Am Legend, the collection holds some truly remarkable footage.
Fortunately, the hospitals were not overrun by the pandemic. Quite the opposite, the hospitals I captured footage at were near empty. Ambulances were parked up and the car parks were almost completely without cars. Appointments were mass cancelled, many future patients left without care.
Early on in the pandemic, even McDonalds was closed.
Supermarkets strictly controlled numbers in the stores, creating huge lines of people outside as they waited for their chance to wander the one-way system to do their shopping.
Once inside the supermarket, the shelves were sometimes empty, as panic buying regularly cleared out sections of the store, starting with hand sanitiser, through toilet paper, and then on to many other product lines, as social media trends influenced our buying habits and fears. There are some incredibly unique shopping scenes within the collection.
The COVID-19 stock footage collection has over 200 unique and interesting clips that were captured during the pandemic.
Hopefully, I won’t be adding any more.
Use THIS LINK to see the collection, and secure a 20% new customer discount.
