I took this photograph in 1990, at the exact moment a child ran across the road and briefly aligned with the immense Canary Wharf tower rising in the distance.
The image captures Canary Wharf at a pivotal stage in its transformation from derelict docklands into a global financial centre. It presents a landscape that is simultaneously unfinished, ambitious, and strangely empty — a visual record of London in transition at the end of the twentieth century.
The development itself was deeply controversial. Critics viewed it as a speculative project, disconnected from the needs and realities of the surrounding communities. The photograph subtly reflects that tension: the architecture appears monumental yet socially absent. The tower block — a monument to free-market capitalism — seems, in an almost surreal way, disconnected from the child in the foreground.
By the 1970s and 1980s, the docks had become emblematic of post-industrial decline and economic abandonment. Under the policies of the Thatcher era and the direction of the London Docklands Development Corporation, the area was reshaped through deregulation, private investment, and large-scale commercial development. Vast areas of publicly owned land were handed to speculators, often with little regard for the people who had long lived and worked in the area.
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The Vibrant Streets of East End London
Bishopsgate is one of the most visually layered parts of London. Situated between the financial district and the East End, it is a place where glass corporate architecture, transport systems, fragments of history, advertising, surveillance, and ordinary pedestrian life collide within the same frame.
The theatre of the street in this image revolves around the woman waiting for the bus, observed both by the static advertisement behind her and by the pedestrian passing beyond the shelter. All three figures remain disconnected, occupying a temporary social stage where strangers share space without necessarily interacting.
I’ve always been drawn to the rhythms of Bishopsgate: the queues, the posture and spacing between bodies, the repetition of verticals formed by poles and buildings, and the choreography of commuters navigating constrained urban space. It is a rhythm very different from the one found only a few minutes away on Brick Lane.
London’s reflective surfaces — especially around the glass-fronted office developments of Bishopsgate — often produce layered compositions in which advertisements, pedestrians, traffic, and architecture visually overlap. That layering mirrors the social complexity of the city itself, where different cultures, redevelopment, finance capitalism, nightlife, poverty, and wealth intersect within the same streetscape.
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Transforming Whitechapel: A Surreal Journey
I must have walked down Whitechapel Road thousands of times, rarely without a camera. I photographed the woman featured in this piece in 1989, pushing a trolley bag along the street with grim determination as she carried her shopping home. What particularly caught my attention was that her trolley had been customised from an old pushchair, a small detail that made her instantly more compelling.
I recently rediscovered the negative and, after scanning it, felt that this anonymous woman deserved to be elevated into a surreal visual narrative — one that transforms an ordinary street scene into something dreamlike and symbolic.
In this reinterpretation, she travels through space rather than simply walking down a London street. A dotted curved line visually connects the composition, guiding the viewer’s eye across the image like the trajectory of a comet or planet.
The empty white background isolates the forms and gives the scene a floating, weightless quality. I cannot deny the influence of Joan Miró on this piece; in many ways it is a homage to him.
The celestial traveller at the centre of the work becomes a metaphor for urban survival, embodying both dignity and quiet heroism.
As Miró said in 1958:
“The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I’m overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains — everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me.”
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Cheshire Street is a historic street in the East End of Spitalfields, running between Brick Lane and Bethnal Green. Once known as “Hare Street,” it developed during the rapid growth of Spitalfields in the 17th and 18th centuries. When I first arrived in the East End in 1982, it quickly became one of my favourite haunts — especially on Sundays, when the market was alive with second-hand goods, antiques, clothes, records, and all manner of hidden treasures.
Spitalfields became famous for successive waves of immigration: first the French Huguenot silk weavers in the late 1600s, then Jewish communities in the 19th century, followed by Bangladeshi families from the 1970s onward. Cheshire Street reflected this constantly evolving East End culture, with its small workshops, busy markets, old pubs, and working-class housing.
Back in the 1980s, wandering through Cheshire Street often felt like stepping onto a film set. Some of the faces and characters you encountered seemed as though they had walked straight out of a Dickens novel.
Unlike many parts of the East End, several streets around Cheshire Street survived wartime bombing and large-scale redevelopment. Their preserved Georgian houses, narrow lanes, and industrial backdrops made the area ideal for recreating old London on film, often requiring little more than careful camera angles rather than heavy special effects. This atmosphere led to Cheshire Street being used as a filming location in Michael Radford’s 1984 adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, starring John Hurt and Richard Burton.
I hardly recognise the Cheshire Street of today after the rapid gentrification that has transformed the area since the 1990s. Even so, one of my old favourites, the Carpenter’s Arms, is still standing. According to East End folklore, the pub was associated with the Kray twins during the mid-20th century. Nearby, the old public bath houses later became home to the historic Repton Boxing Club, which trained generations of notable British boxers. Today, many of those once-gritty buildings have been converted into luxury flats — a striking reminder of how dramatically the East End has changed.
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Exploring Isolation Through Urban Photography
I took this photograph from a rooftop overlooking Hanbury Street during a party celebrating the opening of the East End Film Festival in 2010. From that elevated vantage point I had an unusual bird’s-eye view of the street below. The image became, for me, a photograph about mobility, digital culture, and changing patterns of urban life.
A laptop is conventionally associated with desks, cafés, offices, or at least moments of pause. Here, however, it becomes integrated into movement itself — computing while walking through the street. In 2010 this looked especially strange and faintly futuristic, because mobile internet culture was still in transition. The woman had originally been sitting on the pavement using the laptop, and I was surprised to see her continue working on it when she suddenly stood up and hurried away. Smartphones already existed, but many people still depended on full laptops for serious connectivity, work, media, and communication.
I think the photograph now has a prophetic quality. Today, seeing people absorbed in devices while moving through cities is entirely normal — phones dominate attention everywhere. Yet the laptop makes the behaviour visible in a more exaggerated and theatrical way. It externalises something that has since become socially invisible: the demand for constant digital engagement. That engagement can isolate people from their immediate surroundings and dull observational awareness. In this photograph, the street itself has become an office.
Hanbury Street, Spitalfields 2014.
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