The photos in this set — the 67th in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike — were taken on September 8, 2012, a lovely Sunny Saturday, and are the second of five sets from September, drawn from the huge archive I’ve been building up of my photographic journeys over the last five months (see the first set here). They also provide a contrast to the photos from November that I published previously, of autumn in south east London (see here, here, here, here and here), although I will soon return to more contemporary photos, as winter is now in full swing and Christmas is just around the corner.

On the day in question, I had set off on a bike ride, and had found myself drawn to the heights of Nunhead, one of the areas next to my home in Brockley, in south east London, where I had lived briefly in 1999, before the birth of my son. Completely unexpectedly, I stumbled on the allotments below Nunhead Reservoir, at the highest point in Nunhead, formerly known as Nunhead Hill, just as people were being let in, and, impulsively, I asked if I could come in and take some photos. For more information, see the Stuart Road Allotment Society’s website, and, for a history of allotments, see the National Allotment Society website, and the article, “A Brief History of Allotments in England.” Read the rest of this entry »

Since I began my project, ten weeks ago, to cycle the whole of London by bike, armed only with a camera, I have managed to become quite familiar with the whole of south east London, Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs, and the banks of the Thames — on the north from London Bridge to the Royal Docks, and on the south from Blackfriars Bridge to Thamesmead, as well as travelling to Stratford — in search of the Olympics — and back, and in this latest set, taken a few weeks ago on a bike ride into central London from south east London — to be followed imminently by a rainy set of photos from the City of London — I found some parts of south east London I had never found before — in Nunhead (in the London Borough of Lewisham) and Peckham, Walworth and Borough (in the London Borough of Southwark), and some that were familiar, which I came across in a largely unplanned manner.

The parts of London I have covered in the last ten weeks are, I concede, only a fraction of this vast metropolis, but the dozens of journeys I have undertaken have made me fit, and have stretched my eyes and my mind, which had become cooped up after six years of researching and writing about Guantánamo and the “war on terror,” and after the 21 months that I have spent railing against the cruelty and myopia of the Tory-led coalition government, which, through an obsession with destroying the state and privatising whatever was not already privatised by Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown, has initiated a savage and deluded age of austerity. Read the rest of this entry »

As part of my ongoing project to travel the whole of London by bike, taking photos of whatever interests me, and whatever I think reflects the state of London at this particular time in its history — the ongoing manifestation of a hideously greedy property boom, for example, or the luscious greenery brought about through endless rain, which is very probably a sign of serious climate change — I’ve just posted to my Flickr account my tenth set of photos of London, and the first in a sub-set of photos of “Green London.”

This project of mine — to record London by bike — began two months ago, through a need for exercise after six years of sitting at a computer, a need to experience the sunshine — whenever the sun emerged — after the rainiest March and April in living memory (a trend that continues), and through a renewed fascination for photography (a love of mine since I was a teenager) after my wife bought me a digital camera for Christmas. Read the rest of this entry »