Liverpool : 1972 – 2025 Volume 1
CLICK ON THE COVER IMAGE ABOVE TO BUY
This photomontage combines two photographs taken on Brick Lane. The image of the woman was captured as she walked past the Seven Stars pub in the 1980s, while the background photograph was taken on a rain-soaked evening in 2003.
I wanted to create a strong visual contrast between permanence and change, using photographic techniques to explore Brick Lane as a place shaped by history, migration, and continual urban transformation.
The blurred background was created using a slow shutter speed combined with intentional camera movement. It conveys a sense of energy, motion, and instability. Streaks of neon light sweep across the frame, evoking nightlife, commerce, and the constant flow of visitors—qualities closely associated with Brick Lane’s identity as a destination for restaurants, bars, and tourism. In contrast, the woman remains relatively sharp and still. Her presence provides a visual anchor within the swirling environment, suggesting resilience and continuity amid relentless change. I wanted her to appear as a figure from another era inhabiting a contemporary, fast-moving city.
The photomontage reflects on Brick Lane’s evolving identity, juxtaposing tradition with modernity, permanence with movement, and individual experience with the spectacle of urban life. Rather than simply documenting the street, the image invites viewers to consider how places evolve over time and how those changes affect the people who have long called them home.
Shopping malls have never really been a go to destination for me but they are an incredible place to photograph people. First of all the lighting is generally the same and consistantly unworldly. Furthermore the ‘street’ funneling shoppers around various shops, cafes and bars is full of a range of different subjects that create different photographic opportunities. I would place the image above into my surreal category.
The remarkable shop mannequin, dressed in shorts, polo shirt, sunglasses and a sweater tied around its waist, stands rigidly inside a display window. Just outside, a tiny designer fluffy white dog walks cautiously across the polished floor. The contrast is immediate: the mannequin represents perfect, manufactured stillness while the dog embodies spontaneous life. The similarity of their pale colouring subtly links them visually despite belonging to entirely different worlds. This is street theatre with a backdrop, courtesy of the shops window dresser. The photograph suggests that modern urban life consists of countless parallel narratives; here it’s an opera with a security guard. A surreal chance coincidence, surely one of the defining pleasures of street photography.
Gentrification in East London: A Photographic Study
The photographs above depict the same stretch of Commercial Street in East London, taken almost three decades apart. Together they provide a visual study of continuity and change in one of London’s most rapidly transformed neighbourhoods.
The first photograph documents the area in 1990, when Spitalfields was still marked by the effects of economic decline following decades of deindustrialisation. Much of the surrounding district retained its traditional working-class character, and only a few years after this image was taken the historic Spitalfields fruit and vegetable market closed and relocated to Leyton, bringing to an end more than three centuries of trading on the site. The closure marked a significant turning point in the area’s economic and social history.
By contrast, the second photograph, taken in 2019, juxtaposes a passer-by with a large fashion advertisement, reflecting a neighbourhood increasingly associated with design, creative industries, boutique retail and affluent consumers. Commercial Street has evolved into a place where global brands and lifestyle marketing occupy spaces that once served working-class communities, local workshops and independent businesses.
Together, the photographs chart a profound transformation in the area’s social identity. The 1990 image belongs to an East End still characterised by relatively affordable housing and long-established immigrant communities, particularly those of Jewish and later Bangladeshi heritage. By 2019, the same streets had become emblematic of London’s wider process of gentrification, attracting professionals, technology companies, galleries, restaurants and rapidly rising property values.
The two photographs therefore raise important questions about who ultimately benefits from urban regeneration. While investment undoubtedly brought improvements to the physical environment and generated new economic activity, these gains were accompanied by escalating rents and house prices that made it increasingly difficult for lower-income residents and independent traders to remain. House prices in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets increased by well over 300 per cent between the mid-1990s and the late 2010s, while commercial rents followed a similar upward trajectory. At the same time, census data show that the proportion of residents employed in professional and managerial occupations rose substantially, reflecting a marked shift in the social composition of the neighbourhood. The fashion poster in the second image becomes more than an advertisement: it symbolises a consumer economy increasingly directed towards a different demographic from the communities that historically gave the East End its distinctive character.
Urban renewal is rarely a straightforward story of progress or decline. Instead, it is a story of competing interests, changing identities and the continual reshaping of place. The transformation of Spitalfields undoubtedly created wealth and restored much of the built environment, yet it also displaced many long-standing residents, small businesses and traditional street markets. Although developers and often the local Council promoted regeneration as a process that would benefit the wider community, the evidence suggests that its rewards were very unevenly distributed.
Exploring East London’s Social Contradictions
The luxury boutiques and wellness clinics of Canary Wharf are only a short walk from neighbourhoods facing persistent deprivation. This photograph is less about one individual than about that uneasy coexistence: conspicuous wealth and entrenched poverty occupying the same landscape, separated by little more than glass, polished stone and the illusion of accessibility.
I took the above photograph recently in the underground shopping mall at Canary Wharf. Whether you visit during the day or late at night, the lighting never changes. It feels detached from the outside world—an underground bunker where capitalism is permanently illuminated, insulated from the rhythms of daylight and the weather.
The subject is absorbed by his phone, seemingly oblivious to the oversized skincare advertisements competing for his attention. The image captures a familiar feature of contemporary urban life: our attention is increasingly drawn to digital screens, even as commercial imagery relentlessly vies for it.
Canary Wharf has evolved from a predominantly financial district into a destination for shopping, dining and leisure. Yet this transformation sits alongside one of London’s starkest social contradictions. Tower Hamlets, the borough that surrounds Canary Wharf, has some of the highest levels of child poverty in the country, with around half of all children living below the poverty line after housing costs. Around three in ten households receive Housing Benefit, highlighting the extent of low-income households despite the immense wealth generated nearby.
Exploring Travel Underground: Moments in Time
This photograph feels less like a picture of the London Underground than one about emotional isolation within a crowded city. Although there are many people using the London underground there’s usually little communication between strangers on the train.
It speaks to the paradox of metropolitan life: being surrounded by strangers while experiencing something deeply personal.
The mood of passengers on the underground changes at different times of day. At night after the pubs have shut passengers are boisterous in the morning they’re quiet.
