black and white photography by rob gardiner.

I am walking above London’s Circle Line step by step, stop by stop. Those who aren’t entirely engrossed by the series will be happy to learn I am now on the homeward stretch! The previous 7 entries (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th) have taken me the 17 stops from Barbican to High Street Kensington. This entry takes me to Paddington. I am shooting with a primitive 4x5 pinhole camera - it has no lens, shutter speed dial or aperture settings. It is a wooden box with a tiny hole in it and little else.

I start the walk from High Street Kensington to Notting Hill.

One of the curiosities of London is the preponderance of bricked up windows. During the 1700s a tax imposed on households was calculated by the number of windows the property had. If you had a dozen windows, you were in for a hefty bill. Homeowners responded by simply bricking up the windows. I am yet to be convinced, but legend has it that this is one of the origins of the term “daylight robbery”. The tax was replaced by “council tax”, a plague that continues to the modern day. Rent an apartment in London today and you can expect to pay $1000-$3000 council tax per year, even if you don’t have a window.

I race pass Notting Hill station to Bayswater.

Constructed soon after window tax was abolished, most of the Circle Line made via the “cut and cover” method. It is only a few dozen feet below ground level. The stations themselves are often left open to the elements, some have buildings above them, and several are covered by semicircular roofs. Some enterprising people from EuropCar Car Rental have turned the top of Bayswater station into a car rental area.

You would not guess it from the shot above, but this represents one of the strangest sections of the Circle Line. Half of the home above is a fake facade merely inches thick. When the underground was built, many existing homes had to be demolished to make way for it. Not so great if you live in one of the poshest streets in west London. So 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens were replaced by a facade that gives the illusion of a continuous row of Georgian Houses. In a bizarre reflection of the window tax we get 14 windows that have nothing behind them. Below, the rear view. (There is more trivia if you are after it).

The last half dozen stops on my walk have been primarily residential areas and so the photos have become more seldom as I go along. There are only so many shots of buildings one can take. An exception are the thousands of “mews” around London of which I will never tire. For every stately mansion in London there is a rather drab back entrance, and usually another mansion also backing on to it. Once these were stables, but now these cobbled streets are some of the quietest and most desirable addresses in the city.

Finally, I arrive at Paddington station where trains have run for more than 150 years, before photography was invented.

After a two month hiatus, my walk continues. I am travelling above London Underground’s Circle Line and aim to veer no more than a couple of hundred yards from the line itself. The walk is recorded with a primitive pinhole camera. Little more than a wooden box with a tiny pinprick sized hole to let in light, a pinhole camera is as basic as photography gets. Prone to error and open to guesswork it has no lens, no viewfinder, no light meter, complicated shutter, or electronics of any sort. A few pieces of wood and brass are glued together and everything else is up to imagination and luck. ‘The Tube’ is much like that too, Victorian engineering that owes more than a hundred years of success to imagination and a bit of luck. It’s passengers are often another story. Shutting out the world with iPods, newspapers and talk of the weather, I’ve always imagined that they are largely oblivious to what the world looks like just ten feet above them. So, this walk. A mix of psychogeography, photography, history, and self education.

Now almost half way through the circuit, I’ve travelled from Barbican to Moorgate, then Tower Hill, Blackfriars, Temple, Embankment, and Embankment to St James’s Park. This latest chapter takes me from St James’s Park to High Street Kensington.

I start at Westminster Cathedral, near to Victoria Station. Just 400 metres from the ancient Westminster Abbey, the century-old Cathedral is often confused with the millenium-old Abbey. Rumour has it that the proximity was something of a deliberate challenge. In July, the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead on the Tube by police. His service was held at Westminster Cathedral. How symbolic then that the tube itself runs almost directly under the cathedral (not symbolic enough for any news organisation to mention it).

On to Little Ben, one of London’s many peculiar monuments. A miniature version of Big Ben’s Clock Tower this clock sits outside Victoria Station. Forever confusing visitors, it shows the time in France. The dedication reads “My hands you may retard or advance / my heart beats true for England as for France”. The hundred yards between the cathedral and Little Ben is one of London’s hot spots for spotting another London peculiarity -”Chuggers”. These professional “charity muggers” accost passers-by and tube-riders hoping to sign them up for direct-debit charity donations. Universally despised, guilt is the tool of their trade (hence the reason they stake-out the largest Catholic cathedral in the land). Ask them to give up their £20 ($30) commission however, and they suddenly seem less friendly. Then the “winner or sinner guy” has his way with you beneath Little Ben.

I’m covering a lot of ground with this walk as the neighbourhood turns residential and the buildings more uniform. The architecture around here has led to this area being labelled “anonymous and unhappy” but there are spots of beauty to be found. On to Sloane Square, and the Sloane Rangers begin to appear. I’m mystified why tourists come to Sloane Square, to be honest, maybe they’re hoping to spot a Hugh Grant or Diana Spencer lookalike. I race on to the Victoria and Albert museum.

Above, yet another ’shot looking up at a building’. Next, the Natural History museum.

Finally, a photo looking down on of the many ‘mews’ around the area.

This coming weekend is London Open House weekend where hundreds of private buildings are opened to the public. To kick it off, the organisers are hosting an all-night walk around the circle line on Friday evening covering the same ground I’ve been covering here. In an interesting coincidence, like me they’re even starting at the Guildhall next to Barbican station. So if you’ve been following my photos here, it may be of interest to you.

So it is the dog days of summer in the UK. Not much time spent behind a camera and less in front of a computer. Last Thursday and Friday I was driving around the remotest parts of Ireland, and it would have been a crime not to take a few pinhole snapshots. Ancient monuments, (relatively) ancient camera.

Above: castle at the Rock of Cashel, a thousand years old; Blasket islands; 1500 year old beehive huts; Cliffs of Moher; the Nave at the rock of cashel, all that remains; the beautiful Slea head; and the rock once again. Nice places.

As with much of my photography lately this is with a pinhole camera (no lens, just a pinprick sized hole) on scavenged Polaroid 55 film.

I am forever receiving requests for pics of my pinhole cameras. Below, pinhole camera just prior to taking the ‘blasket island’ pic. Unkind readers might say this is the better picture…

For those curious, the camera is supported using an inexpensive “Manfrotto Magic Arm”, one of the seven wonders of the Earth (as voted by me).

My humble little project is to walk the above-ground circuit of the Circle Line, taking photographs with a primitive, cumbersome, and unreliable pinhole Camera. My previous installments have taken me from Barbican to Moorgate, Moorgate to Tower Hill, Tower Hill to Blackfriars, Blackfriars to Temple, and Temple to Embankment. This sixth installment takes me to St James’s Park past the political and civic headquarters of the nation.

Eleven days ago, London Underground was attacked by several suicide bombers. Like seven million other Londoners, I’m safe and sound. Thanks to all those who asked. I was on the Circle Line passing through Embankment at the time.

The last installment left me at Cleopatra’s Needle outside Embankment. One of the most interesting books on London is Chiang Yee’s 1938 ‘The Silent Traveller in London’. He says that the Sphinxes and Needle “have pride and dignified tranquility. [The monument’s] greatness will never be spoilt or harmed even if it has to pass through sufferings or painful times. In front of this monument while I am passing, I feel myself very small - only a tiny dust particle of which it must have seen countless millions during the ages. And I also feel that it will just laugh at the struggle of human life and the present conflicts between nations. How many more it must have seen before European nations had names!”. The Sphinxes are now scaffolded behind plastic in the name of periodic conservation, their eyes shrouded from the current troubles.

Above, a makeshift memorial to the victims across the road from the monument in Victoria Garden. From amongst the flowers, photographs of the dead stare up at the camera. I move on a few hundred metres to the safety of the London Eye.

I’ve photographed this many times, but never tire of taking the same shot. A Circle Line itself, but with 32 pods rather than 27 stations.

To Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, which sit only metres above the Circle Line. When George Bush visited London for three days in 2003 he tried to have the Tube closed down for the period. Apparently it might have been a terrorist target. The mere thought that the tube runs under the Houses of Parliament and the Queens Palace seemed to startle his entourage. Thirty seconds after I stop and raise my strange camera toward Big Ben, police appear. A jovial bobby tells me that the “little eyes” of CCTV have seen me and “they’ll be watching you now” but there is nothing is nothing illegal about taking the photograph.

On the eve of George Bush’s visit in 2003 the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said that Bush was the “greatest threat to life on this planet that we’ve most probably ever seen”, “a stooge of the oil industry”, “corrupt”, and “illegitimate”. Last week a circumspect Livingstone received global accolades for his public show of London spirit. The short-term memory of CNN and co. did not see the double edged sword of his rage at the terrorists for targeting “ordinary Londoners”, not “Presidents or Prime Ministers”.

This tension between the politics of the City and the Nation is in evidence directly opposite the Houses of Parliament. There sits Brian Haw, as he has done every day and night since June 2001, protesting the UK’s foreign policy. The government has tried to have his “shanty town of placards” removed many times, and in two weeks time they will have have prevailed. For the first time in several hundred years, it will not be legal to protest outside parliament. At least not without six days written notice and permission.

I cross Brian’s Parliament Square past the statues of Churchill (World War II), Lincoln (American Civil War), Peel (instituted the Police force), Palmerston (Secretary at War), Smuts (Boer War), and Cromwell (English Civil War) and take a photograph of Westminster Abbey. The site has had a religious presence for 1400 years. Buried in the Abbey are Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, David Livingstone, Ben Jonson, Charles Dickins, Tennyson, Olivier, Chaucer, Samuel Johnson, Rutherford, Maxwell, JJ Thompson, Purcell, and Hardy, to name a few. No wonder the tourists flock here.

London Underground, known as Transport for London, has its headquarters above St James’s Park station. An ominous building built in the late 1920s, it has a colourful history. Here you see part of the ‘Day and Night’ sculpture which enraged 1920s London, due to the public show of sculptural nudity. Engulfed in scandal, the manager director of the Underground offered his resignation over this sculpture. How strange, we say 80 years later.

I continue my walk toward Victoria Station but don’t get far. A middle aged man of ‘middle-eastern appearance’ runs around the corner of Victoria Street and drops a paperback book as he is wrestled to the ground by two burly young men. They lock his arms behind his back and push his nose hard into the pavement each time he screams for relief. His crime appears to be shoplifting a £5 book. It is more than ten minutes before the wail of police sirens are heard. One of the apprehenders fumbles in the pockets of the man that he is holding down with his knee. I tell one of the eight policeman that the citizen’s arrest was rather violent. The policeman tells me to “keep your opinion to yourself” and to “move along”, apparently the man had “drugs in his pockets”. The man is cuffed and screaming that he is only being arrested as he looks Muslim, that they put things in his pockets, that he will be deported. The crowd moves on. I catch the tube home for the first time in eleven days.