With the wheel of the year turning from autumn to winter, the days getting shorter, the cold settling in, and the leaves first of all turning from green to yellows, oranges and reds, and then falling from the trees, I wanted to make sure that I made available some of my photos capturing these changes before winter firmly takes over.

In my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, in which I recently marked the publication of my first 1,000 photos in 50 sets, I have been out and about relentlessly as the summer gave way to autumn, and now as autumn is giving way to winter, but I have found it impossible to upload the photos to keep up with my productivity. I now have 217 sets of photos to upload — over 4,500 photos in total — taken from mid-July to yesterday, capturing this extraordinary city in bright sunlight, in the rain and the mist, in the early morning, at noon, in the late afternoon and at night, and at all points of the compass, to add to the 1,000 already posted. Read the rest of this entry »

As part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, I recently reached a small milestone, as the last set I uploaded, “The Open-Air Street Artists of Ashby Mews, Brockley,” was the 50th set I have uploaded since I began this project in May.

Those 50 sets contain my first 1,001 photos, and although it will take tens of thousands of photos to try and capture in any meaningful sense London’s streets and buildings, its houses, shops and offices, its parks and rivers, its skies and its forgotten places, and the movements of the people who bring these places to life or are crushed or belittled by them, in all 32 boroughs and the City of London, I have another 213 sets that I have photographed over the last three and a half months, but haven’t yet had the time to upload, containing over 4,500 more photos from the trips I have been making on an almost daily basis, so I do feel that I am making some meaningful progress. Read the rest of this entry »

Before Brockley, in south east London, was mugged by the selfish and arrogant forces of gentrification, with the arrival of the upgraded East London Line, it had been a haven for Bohemians for many decades — with artists, writers and musicians all taking advantage of its leafiness and its affordability.

At the heart of Brockley are broad, tree-lined Victorian streets, mostly built in the 1880s and 1890s, when the former fields of Brockley were opened up to developers with the arrival of the railway. These roads form a conservation area, first designated as such by Lewisham Council in 1973, in recognition of the area’s “special architectural and historic interest,” which was extended in 1991, 1993 and 2005. Read the rest of this entry »

Following the three previous photo sets (two from Soho, and one from Bankside, between Blackfriars Bridge and Southwark Bridge), this set covers the last part of my journey through London on September 7, 2012, as I travelled from Southwark Bridge to London Bridge, and back to my home in Brockley, in south east London, by train. It is the 49th photo set in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike.

This brief journey involved me passing through Borough Market, the celebrated outdoor food market near London Bridge that is a huge attraction every Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and on to London Bridge station, where various ongoing upgrades, as well as the building of The Shard, London’s tallest skyscraper, have led to many significant changes in the last few years. Read the rest of this entry »

The photos in this set — the 48th in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike — were taken in Bankside, on September 7, 2012, after I returned from the journey around Soho that I recorded here and here.

On the south bank of the River Thames, in the London Borough of Southwark, the area known as Bankside is located between Blackfriars Bridge on the west and London Bridge on the east. Its name was first recorded in 1554, and it was, at that time, and through the Elizabethan period, a place outside of the laws governing the City, where plays were performed, and bear baiting and other bloody sports involving animals took place. Read the rest of this entry »

This is my second set of photos of Soho (following my first set here), taken on September 7, 2012 (a very sunny Friday) as part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike. The 24 photos in this set are also the 47th set of London photos that I have so far uploaded, in a project that continues to grow beyond my capacity to make it all publicly available.

Just to give you an insight into how the project has grown, I have another 200 sets of photos to post, containing 4,300 photos in total, from nearly 70 separate journeys to points north, south, east and west. These were taken over the last three months, so please bear with me if there’s a part of London you’re hoping to see. I’ve covered a lot of ground in the last three months, and discovered some wonderful places, as well as some unnerving developments, and although vast swathes of the city are still untouched by my wheels and as yet unphotographed with my trusty Canon Ixus — especially in the west — I aim to remedy that in the months to come. Read the rest of this entry »

Following up on the photos I published yesterday of the best placards and banners I saw on Saturday’s 150,000-strong march and rally in central London (“A Future That Works,” organised by the TUC), this second set of photos features the march more generally, and includes photos I took of various union members and activists on Victoria Embankment, and also as the march proceeded up Whitehall, along Piccadilly, and into Hyde Park for the rally at the end of the day.

There various speakers, including Labour leader Ed Miliband, addressed the government’s crimes against British workers — and also schoolchildren, students, the old, the ill, the homeless, the unemployed and the disabled. My archive of articles about the Tories’ wretched policies, and the resistance to them, is here. Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone with a heart would be hard-pressed to say that living in Tory Britain — with the particularly savage dolts currently in Downing Street and in the Cabinet — is anything less than an ordeal. Through their treatment of the disabled alone, ministers have taken a route that is thoroughly depressing on a permanent basis, as the government — and its overpaid puppets in the French multinational Atos Healthcare — systematically pursue a policy of making disabled people undergo tests designed to prove that they are fit for work — when they are not — to cut their state support.

The stress and the impoverishment of those who should be helped rather than put through this callous ordeal — and which is repeated if claimants manage to prove that they are unfit for work, or if they successfully appeal (as a majority do) — enrages me on a daily basis, but they are not the only casualties of the Tories’ shrinking state — one which, shockingly, public sector expenditure will plummet to a smaller percentage of GDP than the US by 2017. Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t imagine London without Soho, which, as the jazz and blues singer George Melly explained, was the only interesting place in the whole country in the 1950s. I first visited Soho in 1976, as a teenager, on a trip to London with my mum. We were staying, somehow, in a big hotel on the edge of Soho by Piccadilly Circus, and when I wasn’t going up and down in the lifts, pretending to be working there, I wandered off in search of Marvel comics, somehow discovering Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed, an extraordinary shop in a basement on St. Anne’s Court, off Wardour Street, which was apparently the biggest science fiction bookshop and comic store in Europe at the time, where I obviously thought I had stumbled onto the closest thing to heaven, and spent as much time as possible browsing and stocking up on favourite comics — a list that, at the time, included Steve Gerber‘s the Defenders and Howard the Duck, the X-Men, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and Daredevil.

Dark They Were closed in 1981, sadly, but by then Forbidden Planet, originally based in Denmark Street, took over, by which time I had also visited London on a few occasions in a completely unsupervised manner, once staying with friends of a friend’s parents in a flat in a mews in Mayfair, of all places, when we spent an entire long weekend in the arthouse cinemas that proliferated in Soho at the time, and, if the tunes in my head are anything to go by, also listening to Motown Chartbusters Volume 3. We watched 17 films in five days, if my memory doesn’t deceive me — Easy Rider, Gimme Shelter, probably some Antonioni … Read the rest of this entry »

Regular readers might recall that, three weeks ago, I posted a set of photos of Deptford, the lively, historically important and frequently maligned area of south east London, between Greenwich and Rotherhithe along the River Thames, and also reaching inland up the River Ravensbourne (which is known, as it nears the Thames, as Deptford Creek). The set was entitled, “Deptford: A Life By The River Thames,” and in it I had the opportunity to discuss Convoys Wharf, a vast, derelict riverside site (40 acres, or 16 hectares) of huge historic importance, which, for the last ten years, has seen developers queuing up to turn it into some kind of inappropriate high-rise housing development for bankers and international investors, intended to include over 3,500 new homes for 9,000 people with the money required to buy into a project that is estimated to cost a billion pounds.

In that set, I also included a handful of photos from the shoreline in front of Convoys Wharf, where there is a listed pier, incorporated in the plans for the site, but only to be tarted up as though it were new , and — as has already been proposed — to serve as the location for a ferry to Canary Wharf, where many of those who would live in Convoys Wharf would, presumably, be working. Read the rest of this entry »