About
London From The Rooftops is my mission and my ode to the city that I love and the city that made me who I am. My teenage years were marked by a curiosity and fascination with my surroundings, a connection nurtured by my love for the musical culture of drum n bass that echoed round the London streets and was ‘our’ thing, a ‘London thing’.
This connection to the music and the city inspired me to go on two-wheeled excursions to far flung exotic destinations such as Lambeth, Hackney, and Stratford, just to mooch about the nooks and crannies. My journeys led through the back streets, to the housing estates, the top floors of tower blocks and eventually to the rooftops. Something compelled me to explore London’s remote aerial limits so I could build in my head my very own version of what the black cabbies call ‘The Knowledge’.
The journey started in some form in the late 1990’s but it really began to take shape in 2003 when I realised how the camera was the easiest way for me to express and document this growing connection that I felt with London.
By 2004 The Princes Trust had recognised my passion, helped me to find my first local authority clients and to get set up in business as a professional photographer. Two years of intense photographic activity followed and by 2006, the date of the oldest photograph on this site, London from the Rooftops had really began to take shape. It was around this time that my focus began to shift from documenting the architecture of social housing to the views themselves that were afforded from social housing high rises. Not content with just shooting from social housing high rises I set about gaining permission to shoot from Central London’s office blocks. Years of building contacts and relationships passed whilst all the time I was strengthening my portfolio in the knowledge that one day it would be my defining body of work.
The wet and wonderful Olympic summer of 2012 was the moment I eventually chose to hold my first London from the Rooftops exhibition and all those years of groundwork came together perfectly. Eight years had passed since a London Tonight feature first launched my work but this time it felt like I had truly arrived.
The mission goes on, London never stops and neither will my enthusiasm for it’s wonderful energy, diversity, architecture and culture. I now have the great honour of being able to continue my project with some very reputable organisations who have the opened the doors of their rooftops to me primarily to see this project flourish. It is a long held dream come true and I have many people to thank but you all know who you are. I couldn’t have done it without you, simple.
Stay tuned. It will only get better