JUNE 2023 · ROAM

City of London

Leadenhall Market is covered by a Victorian iron and glass roof that turns the market into an interior street. The ironwork is painted — ornate, coloured, detailed at every junction. Outside, thirty metres away, the Lloyd's building stands with its service infrastructure on the exterior: ducts, cylinders, pipes running up the outside of the structure as if the building was turned inside out. The two are in the same photograph only if you step back far enough.

Leaded windows and classical columns stand against glass towers with geometric window patterns. Old Tom's Bar has an iron shutter pulled across the front and a pediment above the door that once meant something about the permanence of the institution behind it.

Leadenhall Market arcade alley with historic Victorian ironwork — The covered alley pulling you down it

— The market and the machine

The Roman grid is still the street grid here. The roads follow lines established before the Great Fire, before the railway, before the telephone. The glass above follows the same lines, more or less. The city got taller without getting wider.

Nobody makes eye contact on the Tube — it's one of the few reliable rules the city has.
City of London — June 2023

Lloyds building with distinctive cylindrical metal pipes and ducts — Infrastructure on the exterior, inside out

— The Roman grid

In black and white the hierarchy flattens. The Gherkin becomes a dark form rising behind the adjacent building's cornice — texture against texture, not colour against colour. The Victorian arcade at Leadenhall resolves into geometry: the ironwork grid of the ceiling, the arched entries, the perspective of the covered alley pulling you down it.

City of London street with historic buildings and classical columns — Roman grid, glass above the same lines

The Gherkin modern tower rising above adjacent office building — Texture against texture, not colour

— In black and white

The Underground runs under all of this. On the platform at Bank: a long white-tiled corridor with signs for Exit 7 and Way Out pointing in the same direction. In the carriage: passengers reading, the overhead lighting catching the tops of their heads and the pages of their phones. Nobody makes eye contact on the Tube. It's one of the few reliable rules the city has.