When people ask me what I most like to photograph, the word I find myself using often is ‘survivors’ - I like to record examples of things that have largely been swept away over the years - a ghost sign, a telephone box, an old shop front or a traditional pub. We hear so much nowadays about communities losing their pubs, but here is the story of The Palm Tree, a pub that lost its community. Bethnal Green 1922 Imagine for a moment that it’s the early summer of 1922 and you’ve

After I’d left my father’s primary school our relationship entered a new phase. We were no longer living in each other’s pockets nearly every minute of nearly every day. Perhaps that is why in the summer of 1970, he decided that it would be a good idea to leave Mum behind and go on a road trip, just the two of us. Mum and Dad in London in 1968 I wrote before about my struggles with car sickness, but, rather embarrassingly, this Welsh boy has never been car sick in England. Th

Sixty-eight. Blimey. Now that I am of an age that my father never reached, I find myself thinking about him a lot and regretting that, as an adult, I never got to know him. When you are a child you don’t consider your parents to be people…they’re just parents aren't they. They’re all right, but you do sometimes wish they were richer, more accomplished or perhaps just a little bit cooler. Could my father not have had a Zodiac convertible rather than a poky little Anglia? In

When people come together to drink there is a change in them, a loss of inhibition, some call it ‘Dutch courage’. Conversation thrives, offering sympathy, empathy, and a good deal of humour. Ideas abound - art is conceived, businesses spawned, romance blossoms. But sadly, only misfortunes are considered newsworthy. The Warrington Hotel (1857) , an opulently decorated Victorian palace in Maida Vale, often used as a location for television and films, has endured many such misfo