As may have become obvious at this point, I live in London and I freaking adore this city. However, as you may have also been able to glean, I’m finishing up school soon and will be moving to university1 up in St Andrews and so I won’t get the chance to see this amazing place as much. As of such, I decided to take an afternoon away from my A-Level revision to go take photos in the City of London.

I usually like walking along the Southbank, but I always love it when I briefly end up in the centre of the city so today I took a tube to Tower Hill, with the aim of eventually probably going home via Bank2 or Cannon Street. For the Southbank walks, I used to have a pretty lovely route but (partially inspired by this MIT blog), I decided to just wander around and move in the direction that had the nicest photos. This ended up looking a little like this:

Strava workout map

To try to challenge myself and provide an artistic limitation, all of these photos were taken with a 50mm F1.8 lens, and I think they came out really well. It was certainly interesting getting all the angles, and there were more than a few occasions when I’d turn into a street, realise that I wanted a photo, and then immediately turned away to get a wider frame.

EDIT: The photos were all originally here, but I updated my photography site a lot after original publication, so the photos are now here.

  1. After a brief gap year in Bangkok (!!!) (will send photos dw 🫡). ↩︎

  2. Ending up at one specific station seems incredibly specific, but Bank station is well-known among Londoners to be both labyrinthine and tardis-like in nature (that is, impossible to gain any sense of direction, and bigger on the inside than the outside) so that provided me with plenty of options. ↩︎