I was fourteen when I first slept on the street. The cold did not arrive all at once; it crept in slowly, through the seams of my clothes, through my shoes, through the uncertainty I had carried with me when I left home. I stood across from a late-night restaurant and watched as its final patrons drifted out, laughing, unaware. The door locked. The lights went dark. The street emptied until only a single lamp cast its narrow glow across the wet pavement. Earlier that day, cars had circled with a kind of hunger of their own. Now there was only the sound of my footsteps and the quiet realisation that I had nowhere to go. I had run from a life I could no longer face, but I had not yet learned what survival would require.
Cities at night have their own kind of silence, even when they’re loud. It’s the silence of being unseen, of passing through the world without leaving a trace. Back then, I never imagined anyone would ever care about my story. Yet here I am, after passing the biblical milestone of three score years and ten, still slightly shocked and deeply grateful that anyone is listening.
People often tell me I’ve lived an “interesting” life. They usually say it with a smile, as though interest were something you carefully planned, like a holiday brochure rather than a series of wrong turns. I smile back, grateful for the kindness, but I rarely recognise myself in those words. This is simply the only life I know. I didn’t set out to build a narrative or chase drama or meaning. Things happened around me, and to me, uninvited, unplanned, sometimes unwelcome. When people ask me to recount them, I’m still caught off guard by their attention, as if they’re talking about someone else entirely.
I was born into a world where you get on with things. You work, you endure, and you don’t make too much noise about either. Words were never my trade. Writing, I confess, has never been my natural language. I argue constantly with the blank page, wrestling with my own clumsiness and my inability to make sentences carry what I’m trying to say. This book exists in spite of me, not because of me. If it has a voice, it’s the voice of someone who learned the hard way, and continues to learn.
On paper, my CV might look improbable for a boy who ran from home and school. In reality, it began with me standing in the offices of a postcard company, trying hard not to look as out of place as I felt. The building smelled of old paper and ink, the kind of place where history settles into the walls. I was a self-taught photographer with more doubt than confidence, helping the world’s oldest postcard company rethink how it saw itself. That was my first real taste of the creative world.
After that came unfamiliar rooms and borrowed lives: photographing the English aristocracy, then some of the world’s leading photographers, then stories drawn from the many cultures of the UK. None of it was planned. It arrived the way most things in my life have, one uncertain step at a time, carried forward more by necessity and stubbornness than by any grand design.