While I wouldn’t call myself a photographer by any means, I do enjoy taking a little snap here and there. Here are a few from some recent wanderings around London. They’re quite compressed, so don’t look super great if you look too close, but hopefully whatever size you’re viewing this at isn’t too rubbish.

A photo of the facade of a brick building on a street corner

A bike shop – presumably – somewhere off a main road in Hackney. I love the two-tone colour scheme of the building, with the black painted brick “base layer” offset by the reddish-brown of all the bricks above. And the all-caps, serif-fonted sign is a nice, little, eye-catching visual that leaps off the wall at me. I like that it’s a bit scuffed; unpretentious. And the flowers! What is this, spring?!

A photo of a seat made out of purple cloth and a wooden frame, outside the window of a residential building, in-between two plants and partially shaded

I spotted this on an unstructured walk. I was in search of a coffee, probably. It was definitely a weekend, definitely around the middle of the day, and definitely sunny and warm. I can’t quite articulate why, but as I walked past, this framing immediately sprung to mind, and felt like something I might’ve seen in a magazine from whoever knows how long ago. I imagine a stylish older person sitting here, reading a beat-up paperback or the newspaper, while sipping a mid-morning coffee, enjoying the pleasant simplicity of it all.

A photo of a blue planter with white spray-painted letters on it saying "Wash Rice", with boats in the background

One of those recurring London graffiti tags you see. It’s been a minute since I’ve seen “Wash Rice” around – and while it may be good culinary advice – it’s a lazy tag, aesthetically. At least overly-realistic balloon face and the blob have some visual character to them. Still, the graffiti backgrounded by a canal full of narrowboats felt like a very everyday London scene to capture.

A photo of a street art paste-up. It appears to be a cartoon robot head wearing a bucket hat, in a colour scheme of neon yellow and neon reddish-pink.

Brick Lane has a lot of funky little dudes graffitied up and around the place. This is one that caught my eye. The colour scheme is aggressively friendly. And the character design is stressfully cute. I have to assume it’s a robot, but the longer I stare at it for confirmation, the less sure I am.

A photo of a metallic sculpture of a pear and a bulb of garlic, in front of some bushes

I feel like this sculpture has been in Spitalfields Market area for as long as I can remember. While the elephants are perhaps more eye-catching (they’re certainly larger and more plentiful), this sculpture feels more arty to me. Maybe it’s because it looks like a still life painting brought into the third dimension. The offset vertical positioning of the pear and garlic, and the loose draping of the cloth, are too inorganic and too evocative of still life painting composition to make me think of anything else. If this is actually a reference to a famous painting and I’m just not aware of it, well… at least my ignorance is published to the internet forever.

A photo of a white building in the distance, poking out from behind the roof of a house in the foreground, set against a cloudless blue sky

I don’t really know what to say about this one. In retrospect, I’m not even sure I like this photo. The scene just looked quite nice in real life, bathed in that rare London sunlight, with a cloudless blue sky. I think this is a building near London Fields.