The criminal, the banker and the person who may not make it to 21 are all there, says the artist and film-maker of his extraordinary project to exhibit pictures of 76,000 of the capital’s kids

Earlier this year, the actor John Cleese, now 80, repeated his claim: “London is no longer an English city.” In 2011, he had told an Australian audience: “I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates you’re left thinking: ‘Well, what’s going on?’” He had previously declared: “I love being down in Bath because it feels like the England that I grew up in.”

In May, he doubled down, insisting his foreign friends felt the same way, “so there must be some truth in it”, and describing London (wrongly) as “the UK city that voted most strongly to remain in the EU”.

We will leave aside the fact that Cleese lives in the Caribbean. His meaning was clear: in a familiar, wilful and tiresome confusion of race and place, he was disoriented by the multiracial and multicultural nature of Britain’s capital.

For his own peace of mind and ossified sense of nostalgia, Cleese should steer clear of Tate Britain for a while. Because next week, the artist and film-maker Steve McQueen’s Year 3 will open there – a display of school photographs from almost two-thirds of London’s primaries. There they stand: more than 3,000 photographs, showing about 76,000 children. The project’s photographers have captured the full range of the capital’s seven- and eight-year-old citizenry: from state, private, religious and special education schools, uniformed, non-uniformed, daffy grins, big ears, long braids, scuffed shoes, ironed headscarves and wild afros.