CONCRETE_OLYMPUS_

Travelling to Bologna felt a bit like a fever dream. Descending over the city through the mountains to Italy's north, a mist lies over the city through which wonky terracotta-coloured brick towers poke. Our taxi driver drove us to the edge of the old city centre and told us he couldn't get any closer to our Airbnb by car.  The buildings to the side of the street overhung the walkways with sheltered corridors like a cloister in a university. Each one had a unique pattered mosaic stone flooring. The facades of the buildings were all a time-washed yellow or orange.  Bologna's geography: in the north of Italy valleyed within hills and mountains in a region where farming is a major industry, and the fact that cars and motorbikes clog up the narrowest of streets, result in a dense fog bear hugging the city. The air quality was incredibly poor, so much so that health advice was to limit too much exposure to the particulates by being outside for too long. It doesn't make for mu...

I don’t often travel to the same place more than once, but Barcelona became a secret garden through a hidden door for me. The first time I visited as an adult I had travelled there to get a tattoo at a shop that I had followed for a long time on Instagram (it had suddenly dawned on me that you could travel for tattoos). My only intention to travel to Barcelona was to get the tattoo, but I willingly got lost there for a few days.   Barcelona was a place where I could walk nonstop for twelve hours a day, sweat through t-shirts, listen to hours of music, explore side streets to find restaurants, look up at the buildings and down at the tiled pavements. I felt like I walked around the streets like a ghost in a Studio Ghibli film. I didn’t talk to anyone for days. My only communication was smiles and happy shrugs to waiters and chefs.   20 years ago I’d travelled on my own to China before smartphones or even 3G and I remember the feeling of arriving somewhere and being overwhelmed ...

  I travelled to Lisbon and didn't photograph a tram.  It was the only image I could see when looking at images of the city before I went there. Tour groups are driven around Lisbon in the kind of safari vehicle you see at a theme park, I assume mainly because after one day of climbing a thousand stairs to get anywhere they were desperate for wheels and an engine.  But Lisbon is a city of beautiful detail which can be easily missed. It's a city of patterns: from tessellated tiles to the mosaic streets, and these little details provide little hints to the city's past.  When you start to notice stars being a common motif, you suspect a socialist or communist influence. Looking up, I also noticed a lot of red and yellow flags in people's windows, some with the face of Lenin. In fact, the Communist Party in Portugal is one of the oldest and strongest Communist parties in Western-Europe. The party was founded shortly after the Russian Revolution and although ban...

I only spent a day in Dubai.  In the morning, I had been driven to Sharjah, which is the ‘other’ Emirate state with Dubai and Abu Dhabi. A long line of traffic was heading the opposite direction to Dubai. Most people live in Sharjah and work in Dubai, my driver told me. Sharjah reminded me of parts of China I’d visited for work 20 years before - all nondescript office blocks, makeshift carparks and roadwork dust. The kind of urban design that gets flattened and rebuilt without any protest or memory of what was before.  After my meeting, I was driven back to Dubai and had time to get changed and explore the city. I was about a mile from the coast, so I decided to head that direction. After an hour I realised that it was impossible to cross a road. Dubai isn’t a city designed to walk around, since it doesn’t seem to have pedestrian crossings. Dubai is a city that has grown up fast, so it obviously doesn’t have the clash of buildings from different eras like other metropolises. ...