CONCRETE_OLYMPUS_

London. I can't work out if it's been my star or my black hole. I've lived in its asteroid belt for my whole life, living in it for just a few years but in its gravity since I was born. I grew up in Slough after my parents moved there from Kilburn. We'd get the bus to London from the local parade of shops in Trelawney Avenue. It blew my mind that we could travel from outside the local butcher to the centre of everything. I was never bored on those bus journeys, even though they took about an hour. I have a recurring dream of walking through derelict buildings in London and have this feeling that I'm returning back to something. I wonder how much of 80s London I soaked in on those visits.  As a young teenager, I'd travel up to the South Bank and Soho for the thrill of flicking through plastic-wrapped vinyl that I had read about on webpages that had taken five minutes to load in the early days of the Netscape internet. Soho was still a rabbit warren of porn shops,...

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. ...

I spent a long time in churches growing up.  Raised as Roman Catholic, mass was a weekly experience. The Irish priests of our church had a particular tone of voice: low, slow and sombre. During sermons it seemed that they were deliberately gradually becoming quieter and slower - lulling us each into a state of meditative boredom before they’d eventually shout the creed at us for us all to stand up and join in with, after wiping the stupor from the corner of our mouths. During those frozen moments, I always remember looking up at the ceiling of the church. The ceiling seemed a mile tall, with rows of arches like an overturned galleon. It was just timber and plaster, but I always imagined our prayers and thoughts getting caught up in the crooks of those arches like lost helium balloons. Those tall vaulted ceilings confirmed that God lived in the sky and that this church had managed to capture part of that sky to assure us God’s company.  We were taught about the omni-presence of...

I walked to the Bouca Housing estate on a November Sunday morning past beautiful streets of townhouses where derelict buildings stood aside modernly renovated ones.  The derelict buildings weren’t boarded up - their windows glassless, the peeling shutters wide open and the doors ajar but for the small amount a padlock would allow them to open. Inside was darkness, collapse, fragments of ownership and on their doorsteps there was the occasion person sitting folded. You enter the Bouca Housing estate through a moment of pastel modernity - a hidden stairwell of weathered yellow and red railings, geometrically punctured by rectangles of light. The shadows of old people coming home with groceries past in the stairwells above. After taking lots of photos, I enjoyed just sitting in the middle of it. It was probably only around 10 or 11am . It was late November, but was warm (for a ginger man).  It amused me to think of sitting here on a Sunday morning at 10am a thousand miles from th...