The First 100 Days of My Photo Project, ‘The State of London’

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Back in May, I launched the first manifestation of a photo project I’ve been undertaking for the last five years — ‘The State of London’, which involves me photographing London on bike rides that I undertake every day, from small local circuits from my home in south east London to long journeys to the other side of town and back.

In the years since I began this project, in May 2012, I’ve visited all 120 London postcodes (the EC, WC, N, E, SE, SW, W and NW postcodes), and have also made additional visits to some of Greater London’s outer boroughs. A few years ago, I had a website made, with an interactive map allowing me to post photos by postcode. I hope to start using the website soon, which will also feature original essays about the capital, its history and its current state, and I’ll also soon be setting up a Twitter page, but for now the Facebook page is the place to visit to see glimpses of what I’ve been up to, and I hope that you’ll “like” it and start following what I do, if you haven’t already.

I’ve lived in London for all of my adult life, since I finished university in 1985, but it wasn’t until 2012 that I realized that huge swathes of the city were unknown to me, and that I wanted to visit all the places I’d never visited, as well as revisiting other places I’d got to know over the years. The trigger was me getting ill in 2011, giving up smoking, and realizing that I needed to get fit, and the photo project was the perfect solution. When I began, I soon realized that even the parts of London closest to me, in south east London were in many ways unknown territory, and, with a blanket ban on bicycles on trains in place in the run-up to the 2012 Olympic Games, I had to cycle through south east London to get anywhere else in London, and, as a result of these journeys and of my shorter bike rides close to home, I eventually got to know almost every street in south east London — and have also photographed many of them at some time or other.

I can’t claim to know the rest of London as well — or to have photographed it anywhere near as much — although central London (the West End and the City), east London (especially via the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, the Regent’s Canal and the Limehouse Cut, and, further east, the Woolwich Ferry) and south west London have all generally been within reach, and it’s generally only the far north and west that I’ve rarely visited.

I began the project as reportage rather than as a fine art project, deliberately using a compact camera — a Canon IXUS 115 HS for the first year, and a Canon SX270 HS ever since — which has often been an advantage (in bad weather, for example, and when I want to avoid the unwelcome attention of security guards in places where public space has been privatized), although I intend, at some point, to get a DSLR camera, to branch out into some fine art projects involving parts of the city that I particularly love — and some of the constantly changing light and weather that I also love, and that affects, sometimes profoundly, how the capital appears.

I have learnt many things from my project — how we are not meant to be in buildings all the time, how we are waterproof (I cycle every day, whatever the weather), and how liberating it is to be off-grid and off-line (I don’t have a mobile phone, so when I’m out and about I’m also incommunicado). In the early days, I often used to get lost, as I travel without a map (or much of a plan), and that can also be quite a giddy, liberating feeling. It happens less these days, but it does still occur.

My feelings about London tend to be very mixed — as can be seen from my song, ‘London’, performed with my band The Four Fathers, in which I lament how the wildness of the 80s and 90s has given way to an almost total obsession with money and greed, siphoning the joy out of life, commodifying everything, and making London, for the first time in living memory, somewhere in which increasingly large numbers of people cannot afford to live, a situation that is both horribly unjust (as those who bought before the artificial housing bubbles of the last 20 years have been made disproportionately rich at the expense of others), and counter-productive, as key workers and the creative people who are often the last point of resistance to capitalism consuming itself and everything it encounters with dullness are forced to move out. This may well be good for other towns and cities, but it is a loss for London, and one that the capital can ill afford culturally.

‘London’ is posted below, and I hope you have the time and the inclination to listen to it —and to buy it as a download if you like it:

While my cycle trips have shown me the endless power and presence of the river, the glory of the capital’s hills, its hidden corners and abandoned places that resonate with me in particular, a panoply of light and colours and moods, and the buzz and colour of ethnically diverse neighbourhoods, in contrast to the general inertia of the city’s rich quarters, it is also rare that I am not confronted at some point by examples of the greed that has been steadily strangling the life of the city over the last 20 years, and that has gone into hideous overdrive since the Tories took power in 2010.

Overpriced towers rise up everywhere, their existence fuelled by a seemingly never-ending orgy of foreign investment, serviced by public school pimps, and, more shockingly, the councils and housing organizations who used to provide social housing, but are now part of the same programme of social cleansing, all determined to remove anyone from London who cannot pay tens of thousands of pounds a year for the alleged privilege of living in the human equivalent of a factory farm cage.

I touch on some of these issues in my photos and the accompanying text, and will never forget how the entirely preventable Grenfell Tower disaster in June exemplified how unfettered greed can lead to social tenants losing their lives — as, I suspect, an underlying narrative that will never go away, however much the sun may shine, and my eyes are drawn to other examples of beauty and grace in the capital.

After all, everything is political — even the decision not to be — and although forms and textures can appeal to us purely on aesthetic grounds, there is little in our lives that does not also reveal where power lies — and that, it seems to me, is especially true of the built environment.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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