I have had a long association with this part of London.
To photograph 6 More London for Barr Gazetas was to return to a piece of the city I know through layers: through architecture, through work, through repeated acts of looking.
Over the years I have photographed Norton Rose here for KKS, and Ernst & Young for M Moser. Nearby, I have worked along Tooley Street, St Thomas Street, and Weston Street for AHMM; at One London Bridge for Jack Bonnington; and on many smaller, immaculate residential warehouse conversions for architects working with the grain of Southwark’s industrial inheritance.
Across the river, I have photographed the Tower of London for AOC, a reminder that this stretch of the Thames is never just a backdrop, but a deep urban theatre of power, commerce, memory and public life.
So returning to More London with Barr Gazetas felt less like arriving at a new commission than re-entering a familiar conversation.
The project is one of reinvention rather than replacement. A 2000s commercial building is being carefully reworked for a different age of work: more open, more generous, more attuned to wellbeing, daylight, amenity, sustainability and human use. New terraces, a renewed arrival sequence, upgraded workplace floors and a richer sense of occupation all point towards a building being drawn back into the life of its neighbourhood.
This is what good regeneration should do. Not erase. Not simply rebrand. But listen, adjust, intensify and reconnect.
More London has always occupied a particular threshold: between the City and Southwark, between corporate London and the civic river, between office life and public promenade. Its success depends not only on buildings, but on the choreography between them, cafés, commuters, cultural institutions, residents, visitors, workers, river light, lunch breaks, evening walks, the constant crossing of London Bridge.
To photograph there means paying attention to that wider ecology. The building is part of a community of work and life, but also part of a larger story about how London continually remakes itself without ever becoming entirely new. Photography, in that context, is not simply about recording a completed object. It is about understanding the pressures around it: the street, the estate, the river, the inherited structure, the people who pass through, and the ambitions of those reshaping it.
Barr Gazetas’ work here speaks to a broader and necessary question: what do we do with the commercial buildings of the recent past?
The answer is intelligent adaptation. A thoughtful retrofit. A building recalibrated for contemporary occupation while retaining the embodied value, urban presence and civic role of what was already there.
For me, the pleasure of photographing it lay in that tension: continuity and change, infrastructure and atmosphere, workplace and neighbourhood, the familiar and the newly possible.
