I have a feeling that I am going to be turning weekend photography trips to London into a thing.

I popped up yesterday with a specific theme in mind, to challenge myself, and to try and improve upon my usual “find an interesting geometric arrangement in a photo”. With that in mind, I sought to discover how the architecture of buildings is reflected in their silhouettes, especially in an urban/street context. This is partly because I do sometimes wonder whether we as architectural practitioners think about the effects of shadow aesthetics on the street setting, other than in a simple “rights of light” legality.

For this particular exercise, I decided to start in Chelsea, walking around through Belgravia & Pimlico, before heading to Soho and the Photographer’s Gallery (that has a series of brilliant exhibitions on at the moment, including a retrospective on Chris Killip). After that brief interlude, I ambled through Soho, with a view to Shoreditch and the Autograph Collection gallery, which also has an interesting exhibition on Sasha Huber. After this, I needed to refuel and nipped by Glasshouse in Shoreditch – a lovely LGBTQ+ café/bookshop that is fast becoming one of my favourite places to nip into (and does a wonderful hot chocolate). Refuelled, I headed back to Chelsea to catch the sunset from Chelsea Bridge, as I was a little too late to catch the last shadows of the day. However, the sunset was gorgeous, and I bumped into a fellow photographer (Michelle) who was also quite taken with the sunset, and we then made our way along the north side of the Thames to get a good view of Battersea Power Station as Michelle advised that some new lighting had been switched on in front of the power station. This was where we then bumped into another fellow photographer (Dom) and we all proceeded to give Battersea a shot with our cameras. Whilst I see plenty of other photographers out and about, rarely do we actually interact, so this was a lovely change!