Smoke From an Unseen Fire

Photographs and Poetry

London is a place of dissolution and renewal. The city caught fire during the Pentecost of 1135 and was rebuilt, until the Great Fire of 1212 consumed the city again. Four hundred and fifty four years later the city experienced a third inferno during the hot summer of 1666, reducing the city to smoke and ruins and forcing the hand of British author John Evelyn to write “London was, but is no more.” Another three hundred and fifty years later, British author Iain Sinclair is explaining in his new novel, The Last London  how “London stalls, revives, suffers and renews itself all the time.” Despite forces of continual destruction, London has revived itself time and time again. 

Throughout it's history London has come face-to-face with it's own identity in the form of fires—visible and unseen.  Now, as it has before, London is burning from the inside out as a result of external pressures. We observe a global city that struggles to make itself affordable to its own citizens, a capitalistic powerhouse, a city of ads overshadowing the facades of history. Exiting the European Union has put many of Britain's internationally-hailing citizens in limbo, uncertain of their future and their place in a country that now seems to reject them. These pressures appear to foster a reclusive culture in it's people, where externalities like news media and the online social world become the invisible epicenter of a vast urban sprawl, forcing an irreconcilable change of value onto a city whose conscience, like most cultural centers, has been long rooted in how London sees itself from the inside-out.

That photo of the sundial
by London Bridge–it's for my fashion blog.

Please see yourself past the Bureau
desk and through 

the two iron doors on your right.
The receptionist will receive you
at the top of the stairs.

Smoke from an Unseen Fire

Photographs and Poetry by A.J. Weber

All images ©Andrew Weber 2018, ©A.J. Weber Photography 2018.