I took this photograph in Aldgate in 1991, when the area was caught between decline and redevelopment. The City of London was expanding eastward, Docklands regeneration was reshaping nearby districts, and roadworks and improvised infrastructure had become constant features of the streetscape.
The woman in the picture is signalling to the approaching bus to stop. I had been cycling through Aldgate and, instead of simply riding past, I got off my bike and stopped to talk with her. She told me that because it was only a temporary stop, drivers would often fail to notice people waiting and sometimes carried on without stopping.
Her walking stick, rather than suggesting vulnerability, became a symbol of determination and strength. She was absolutely intent on making that bus stop.
My bicycle, leaning in the foreground beside the makeshift barrier, became part of the scene too — a reminder that I was not a detached observer but briefly part of the same improvised urban choreography.
Aldgate has changed dramatically since 1991. What seemed at the time an ordinary roadside moment now reads as an archival record of a transitional East End landscape before large-scale commercial redevelopment transformed the area. As much as it is a portrait of a feisty East End woman, it is also a portrait of London itself: permanently unfinished, adapting in real time through makeshift solutions, resilience, and everyday encounters.
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East London: Capturing the Spirit of Transformation
I’ve photographed Brick Lane and the surrounding area for more than forty years, and together these images form an archive of a disappearing London. I’ve always thought of Brick Lane as a kind of stage set, with multiple planes of action unfolding simultaneously. People move in different directions: some aware of each other, others isolated within their own trajectories. The street has a restless, kinetic quality that felt especially characteristic of East London in the early 2000s — a place where identities, economies and histories constantly overlapped and collided.
For Brick Lane in particular, change has been accelerated by its proximity to the financial centres of the City and Canary Wharf. In 2003, the area was at a moment of transition: still visibly working-class and deeply shaped by Bangladeshi immigrant culture, yet increasingly attracting artists, students, nightlife and the first strong waves of gentrification.
Personally, I’m saddened by the way local people have been pushed out through that process. Walking along Brick Lane in the 1980s, I would always run into people I knew. It was a place for the exchange of neighbourhood news, gossip, laughter and protest. Today, much of the street theatre I loved has become corporatised and bland.
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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.”
You can buy a signed copy of my latest photo book here
Watch The Photographer – a short film about the photography of Phil Maxwell:
