Write Off

Life is full of twists and turns and, I guess that’s one of the things that gen­er­al­ly makes it fun and inter­est­ing. Of course, not all of life’s events are hap­py ones, and some­times they change us in a way that we hadn’t expect­ed. Last year I was in Scot­land and had spent time pho­tograph­ing my favourite land­scapes, lochs, moun­tains, seascapes – the weath­er had been kind to me, and as I head­ed away from Ullapool towards Inver­ness, I was look­ing for­ward to a few days in the York­shire Dales with my wife, who was head­ing up from Lon­don. Then, from nowhere, two deer leapt out of the dark­ness and, despite brak­ing hard, I knew I couldn’t avoid hit­ting at least one of them. The result was that my car was a write off, the deer escaped, hope­ful­ly, no worse than bruised. 

As pho­tog­ra­phers, we rely on trans­port of one sort or anoth­er to explore and vis­it loca­tions that cap­ture our imag­i­na­tion, and the car is per­haps the most used mode, as many of the loca­tions we love have lim­it­ed or no pub­lic trans­port. Of course, I need­ed to get anoth­er car……..or did I? My wife had a car, so I start­ed to won­der if anoth­er car was essen­tial – aside from the envi­ron­men­tal impact, I reck­oned that I could afford to hire a car for 7 weeks of the year and be a lit­tle bet­ter off than if I bought a car. So here we are 15 months lat­er, and I no longer own a car, for the first time in near­ly 40 years.

Since the write off, I have been to Scot­land a cou­ple of times, a mix of pub­lic trans­port and a hired vehi­cle worked fine, but more sig­nif­i­cant­ly, I have been explor­ing places clos­er to home using pub­lic trans­port. Look­ing back, I won­der if I was ready for this change. We vis­it places like Scot­land because they offer us beau­ti­ful land­scapes in which we can explore nature and make won­der­ful images that take us away from the day-to-day rou­tine, which, for most of us, is in an urban area. In my free time, I decid­ed to explore some land­scapes that are urban and indus­tri­al, walk­ing the banks of the Thames, not by London’s bridges and archi­tec­ture, not through Oxfordshire’s mean­der­ing mead­ows, but towards the estu­ary, start­ing at the Thames Barrier. 

On one of my first walks at low tide, I was struck by the rub­bish that had been thrown by local res­i­dents into this great riv­er, and as I explored fur­ther, I dis­cov­ered how much indus­try is still using the riv­er as a vital trans­port link, in some cas­es, only a few miles from Tow­er Bridge. I found it a rather depress­ing but nonethe­less fas­ci­nat­ing land­scape with a mix­ture of new indus­tri­al devel­op­ment along­side relics of the past, all mixed amongst marsh­land that is home to a mul­ti­tude of wildlife. Then there are the res­i­den­tial devel­op­ments, old and new, rub­bing shoul­ders with indus­try. It is most­ly a harsh, grit­ty envi­ron­ment with graf­fi­ti, rub­bish, high con­crete flood walls, razor wire fences, tank farms and fac­to­ries. It is a chal­leng­ing envi­ron­ment in which nat­ur­al beau­ty is hard to find; it is an envi­ron­ment that shows clear­ly the impact we have on the plan­et we live on. As I walk the paths along­side the riv­er, I won­der if the indus­try that is seem­ing­ly always with­in my line of sight, with its bla­tant dis­re­gard for the nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment in pur­suit of giv­ing me, the con­sumer, what I want, makes some feel that throw­ing rub­bish into the riv­er is OK. I come across three met­al bench­es posi­tioned below the tow­er­ing chim­neys of a soap fac­to­ry – I won­der who comes and sits here, per­haps their only place of escape from the four walls of home.