Lines That Hold the City

When you spend enough years shooting on the streets, you realise London isn’t just about people, it’s about the structures that funnel them, frame them, and, sometimes, overshadow them. Geometry becomes a subject in itself.

The first image is The Gherkin, reduced to pure shape. Glass and metal cut into repeating diamonds, each pane carrying fractured reflections of the surrounding city. The rhythm of those lines is what makes the photograph a kind of order imposed on the chaos of central London. I wasn’t chasing the building for its fame, but for the way its surface becomes something else entirely when you step in close and pay attention to the details.

The second image, inside the Lloyd’s building, is a different kind of geometry, vertical shafts of metal, glass elevators, and the sudden intrusion of St. Paul’s dome reflected in between it all. I kept this one in colour because stripping it to black and white would have flattened the mood. The natural tones inside were already bleak, almost industrial, and the muted palette adds weight to that atmosphere. The colour here isn’t about beauty, it’s about honesty.

Both frames are about the edges: metal against sky, glass against stone, reflections cutting into reality. Street photography doesn’t always have to be human-driven. Sometimes the subject is the infrastructure itself, the skeleton of the city, the lines that hold everything in place.