In 1980, for my 25th birthday, my dad, Gordon, still living in the same council house back in Motherwell, presented me with my first, brand new camera. It was a very expensive Nikon. I was still living in a squat with some friends in Primrose Hill nearing the end of my architectural degree at The University of Westminster on Baker Street.

The first thing I did was load up my camera with some B+W film and head up Primrose Hill that provides a panoramic view of Regents Park Zoo and the city of London beyond. I wandered all over the Hill that day, the weather was fair, the light fading, and I captured a series of images that I was happy with when I finally printed them. Almost all of the images had a well-defined horizon line and captured various people, dogs, joggers and some folks just sitting on a solitary park bench right on the peak of the hill looking out over the city. The negatives survived until I loaded them on to a disc 25 years later in Brisbane, Australia and had a look at them on a computer screen for the first time. I also printed an A4 size set and decided to overlay some tracing paper and create some very simple black ink drawings showing almost no detail but somehow managing to capture a range of images reflecting mostly solitude.

This collection of photographs were never translated into colour in any form and the ink drawings survived until I had another look at them here in Belfast in 2020. They made their way on to my Facebook page and were well received so I decided to create a whole new set of 25 new characters on Primrose Hill that were a figment of my bizarre imagination and they appeared every day on the journey from December 1 to Christmas in 2020.

london 1980 • 2020