Look up.
It’s the best piece of photography advice I’ve ever been given, and it’s also the one I forget the most.
When you’re walking around London, you look ahead. You look at the pavement, at the crowds, at the person in front of you who has suddenly stopped to check their phone. You look at the traffic. You look at where you’re going.
What you very rarely do is look up.
Which is a shame, because there is so much up there.
On this particular day I did remember. And there it was, perched right at the top of an old brick building, a little name plate that simply said THE ALBERT.
That’s all.
No fuss. No neon. Just two words, carved and set into the stonework, sitting quietly above the street as they have done for well over a century.
And directly behind it, rising up into the sky, an enormous sharp-edged wedge of blue glass.
I stood and stared at it for quite a while.
I think it’s the contrast that got me. The old building, with its chimneys and its decorative cornice and its little name plate, so very Victorian. And then this vast modern glass thing behind it, all angles and reflections, so big that it practically takes over the whole sky.
The old building is completely dwarfed.
And yet, somehow, it’s the old building you look at.
The Albert is a pub on Victoria Street and it has quite a story. It was rebuilt in the 1860s by the owner of the Artillery Brewery and named after Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband. It survived the Blitz. It’s Grade II listed. And it’s the only building left from the original development of Victoria Street.
Everything else around it has been knocked down and replaced. Some of it more than once, I suspect.
And there it still is.
I find that rather wonderful.
Over the years, London has grown up around this pub. Taller, shinier, busier. Offices have come and gone. Glass towers have gone up. Millions of people have walked past on their way to somewhere more important.
And The Albert has simply carried on being The Albert.
It made me think about how much of the city is like this, if you just take a moment to notice. Little bits of the past hanging on in between the new. A Victorian name plate here. An old ghost sign painted on the side of a building there. A boot scraper by a front door. A date carved above a window.
Most people won’t notice them.
I didn’t, for years.
Then I started walking with a camera, and something changed. I started looking at the world differently. I started noticing the details. The small things, the overlooked things, the things that tell you a bit about the history of a place if you’re willing to stop and read them.
This name plate is a perfect example.
You could walk past The Albert a hundred times and never see it, because it’s so high up, and because the glass building behind it is so very loud.
But once you have seen it, you can’t unsee it.
I love that about photography.
It changes the way you move through the world. It slows you down. It makes you curious. It makes you ask questions. When was this built? Who put that name up there? What was here before?
And sometimes you go home and look it up, and discover that the answer is even better than you’d imagined.
The photograph itself was a bit of a gamble. Shooting up towards a bright sky on film is always a little risky. Get it wrong and you end up with a sky that’s completely blown out, or a building that’s nothing more than a black shape. Here, the old building has fallen into shadow, but the name plate has just enough light on it to be readable, and that glass is a lovely deep blue against a soft, pale sky.
I’ll take that.
It isn’t perfect. There’s a dark corner on the right where another building creeps into the frame. But I quite like that too. It feels like the city closing in, which is exactly how it felt standing there with my head tipped back, trying not to get trampled by commuters.
Because that’s the other thing about looking up in London.
You do have to stop.
And stopping in London is a bit of a risky business.
People tut. People sidestep. Someone almost certainly mutters something under their breath.
But it’s worth it.
It’s always worth it.
So this is my gentle reminder, to you and to me.
Next time you’re walking somewhere, even somewhere you’ve been a hundred times before, look up.
You never know what’s been sitting up there, waiting for you to notice.