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Five years ago, on May 11, 2012, I began a bike-based project to record London in photos that has ended up with me visiting all 120 of London’s postcodes (those that begin EC and WC, NW, N, E, SE, SW and W), as well as some — but not all — of the areas that make up Greater London, with a population of 8,673,713 in 2016 in the 32 boroughs (and the City of London) that make up the capital.

On these journeys, I have taken tens of thousands of photos of whatever attracts me, architecturally, historically, culturally, as well as photos of the changing seasons and the changing weather, and the changing face of the city as greed and regeneration remake whole swathes of the capital, often in what I regard implacably as an ugly and divisive manner.

The project arose as a response to a difficult time in my life. Contracting a rare blood disease in 2011 led to me giving up smoking and piling on the pounds in response. A year after my illness, it was clear that the way I’d been living for five years prior to my illness — and that had largely continued in the year since (although, crucially, with the consumption of sweet and salty fatty things replacing the cigarettes) — was not a healthy way to proceed. My life was too much on a laptop, and largely sedentary, and something had to change.

As a result, I thoroughly reacquainted myself with what was possibly my oldest hobby — cycling, which I began as a child, and which I had always done, although not as regularly as I should have after I began researching and writing (about Guantánamo) on a full-time basis in 2006. I had started cycling regularly around south east London in the early months of 2012, often with my son Tyler, who was 12 at the time, and on May 11, 2012, I decided to start taking photos of my meanderings by bike, and to consciously wander further afield. Read the rest of this entry »