I was interviewed today by the Spitalfields Life website about the photographs of Billingsgate Market which I published recently. While I was going to the meeting I stopped to take some photos around St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate church. The most unusual feature is a Turkish Baths, just outside the church courtyard, dating back to 1895. It looks very out of place surrounded as it is by modern high-rise office blocks, although today it’s run as Turkish restaurant. Read more…

I had a trip to Cambridge at the weekend which included going up the tower of Great St Mary’s church. It was quite a climb up a very narrow spiral staircase. Luckily there were plenty of places where you could stop to get your breath and let people going in the opposite direction pass.

Looking North

In Wandsworth Road on the border between Clapham and Battersea there’s a very faded old ghost sign for Hovis. Next to this there used to be a more recent sign for ‘TV Audio Video Repair’. This is now fast disappearing behind a trellis full of climbing roses.

This is a series of portraits I made when I was a student at the London College of Printing in 1975. There were about five of us involved in this project. We left a sign outside the college inviting anyone to walk in off the street and have their photograph taken for free. Over the three days that the project ran for these are the people who came in when I was ‘on duty’. Read more…

I really don’t like the new update to the Flickr app. Why have they made it so that the thumbnail images are all cropped to square when the previous version respected the aspect ratio of the photographs. I know I crop my images to square for my galleries on this blog, but that’s my choice and I crop selectively, not just using whatever happens to be in the middle of the image. Read more…

This is a set of photographs I took at Billingsgate Fish Market in 1975 when I was a student at the London College of Printing. They were taken for one of the journalist students who was doing a series of articles on the dying London markets. Read more…

A couple of days ago I was doing some more panoramic photography in my ongoing series of Cornish churches. In St Winnow church, which stands on the bank of the River Fowey, are some really nice medieval carved bench ends. The best two were of a ship in a storm and a drunken man wearing a Cornish kilt. In the ship in a storm you can see a demon in the sky with his cheeks puffed out blowing up the storm while four men cower in the boat. And the drunken man is swigging what is presumably cider from the bottle. Read more…

I was walking through Stockwell today when I saw a ghost sign that’s been fairly recently repainted. If you look closely you can just see a faint trace of the old sign showing through. I’ve done a couple of screen grabs from Google Street View which shows how the sign used to look about a year ago.

I’ve just found out that I’ve had one of my photos accepted for the 2014 Ghostsigns Calendar. Very chuffed! Mind you, I only just made it in 12th place.

In case you’re wondering a chaudronnerie and a serrurerie is a boilermaker and a locksmith, selling new and used boilers, stills and piping.

I went to Constantine Bay yesterday morning and in between the heavy showers and gusting winds I managed to take a few nice photos. I was particularly pleased with this one – and yes, I thought it would work well in black & white as I was taking it.

Click on the photo to see some more of the photos on my Flickr feed.