Spare Hour, W1T

2026 · Fitzrovia, London W1T

Project

A meeting on Berners Street finished early. Thirty-three degrees outside, a camera in my bag and an hour to kill that wasn't supposed to exist. I gave it to whatever stood within ten minutes' walk.

The street is named for the Berners family, who laid the estate out in the eighteenth century, and their grid still holds everything I photographed. Fitzrovia is dense in that way that London manages - with a chapel, a masterpiece and a murder scene from the movies inside a quarter mile, all wedged between offices and the last of the rag trade. I had a list. The sun redrew it. August top light kills any façade and burns anything pale, so I kept to the shade and let the temperature do the curating.

Fitzrovia Chapel first, which inverts something I keep photographing elsewhere. My usual subject is the overlooked thing beside the famous thing - the parallel street, the forgotten venue. Here it ran the other way round. The old Middlesex Hospital was significant, an entire institution filling the block and it was demolished. The chapel is the fragment that's left standing and all the glass built around it since has the air of a development pretending the survivor was always part of the plan. The overlooked thing outlived the important one.

Then Newman Passage, because it's covered and dark and the daylight gives up at the arch. In 1960 Michael Powell put the opening of Peeping Tom here, a murderer with a camera stalking the length of it. The passage has one entry in the history books and it is a camera pointed down it. I stood roughly where his tripod must have been and pointed my camera.

I left by Charlotte Street, heading to Euston. The façades came last, taken square-on when the shade allowed, verticals are true, the Georgian brick doing its thing regardless of the century.

Most of my projects are made at the borders of my working life. This one is probably the purest case of it. A set of photographs that exists only because a meeting ended forty minutes ahead of schedule. Then half the hastily drafted list went unvisited. Two Georgian lanes and the layered brass doorplates of the rag trade streets are still waiting, unphotographed, there for the next overrun to end early. The hour ran out.

A narrow canyon between modern London buildings, a hard diagonal of shadow across pale stone, trees in planters at the far end.

Black and white photograph
Fitzroy Place, London W1T
29 July 2026, 10:50

The shadow of a young tree thrown across a sunlit pavement, leaves and branches drawn in sharp black.

Two people sitting apart on a kerb in full sun outside a glass-fronted building, their reflections in the glass behind.

The interior of the Fitzrovia Chapel, its marble apse and mosaic vault above an altar, candles massed across the floor.

A Fitzrovia street in hard morning light, a 1960s office block along one side and the BT Tower closing the view at the far end.

A City of Westminster street sign reading Newman Passage W1, fixed to a wall of black-painted brick.

Looking out from the covered section of Newman Passage to a cement mixer and construction hoarding in the daylight beyond.

A narrow London passage running under a brick barrel vault, flagstones below and patches of reflected light on the wall.

A very narrow alley between buildings, a shaft of sunlight on the brick at left, a Georgian frontage closing the far end.

A projecting box sign reading VAGABOND above a dark shopfront, posters pasted on hoarding below and a plane tree behind.

The interior of ROKA on Charlotte Street seen through plate glass, tables laid and empty, the robata grill and kitchen pass beyond.

Looking up past a brick and concrete roofline to the BT Tower standing against a clear sky.

The bronze statue of Francisco de Miranda in its niche on the corner of Fitzroy Square, old street signs for Fitzroy Street on the brick above.

Dozens of office workers standing on the pavement and roadway at Fitzroy Square in bright sun, a Georgian terrace and the BT Tower behind them.

Fitzroy Square in full sun, a Georgian terrace behind iron railings, the street empty.

A Georgian brick terrace photographed square-on, sash windows and shuttered ground floor, two small cars parked at the kerb.

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