London <

I came in to the world pretty much on the banks of the river Thames in the London borough of Richmond. My family moved to quiet, leafy Surrey when I was about six, so the majority of my childhood and adolescence was rural, but I moved back to South then central London for work in my early twenties. I always preferred being close to the river and stayed south side, near the parks in Wandsworth and then Battersea. I loved the buzz and pace of everything London offered and commuted daily by motorbike for over a decade, weaving in and out of traffic to my office in the centre of Soho, a surprisingly incident free affair, apart from an altercation with a pushy London cab driver, running over my foot while waiting at the lights on Trafalgar Square, which I now look on as some sort of badge of honour, albeit a sore one at the time.

London has changed so much since I last lived there and I’d think twice now about riding in to Soho with the same sense of freedom and enthusiasm I used to. It has become unbelievably busy, almost unrecognisably so and so much taller too, even in places where I once remember level ground. It is also now stratospherically expensive and almost all of the group of friends that formed my regular London family have moved out, away or abroad. But despite all this, London is still an amazing city, which if you have lived or spent any time there, gets under your skin and there are elements of my South London life that I still miss. Even after selling up and relocating to the Sussex coast over twenty years ago, London does weirdly sometimes still feel like home.

The images in this portfolio are an eclectic selection from my regular routes over the years; the now redundant Chelsea gas works, the salubrious Walkers Court in Soho, Piccadilly Circus, Chelsea bridge.