A city like London shifts, changes and renews itself continually, and often organically. I have lived here long enough to start seeing this process first hand.
Needs and tastes change. The architecture of a city often reflects this. Some buildings are pulled down and replaced. Others are changed, altered and added to. Each generation making its mark from the last.
A good example of this is the British Museum in London.
The Museum, established in 1753, houses a collection showcases human history and culture in London – and holds over 7 million items.
The British Library used to be housed within the British Museum until 1997 but moved to its current St Pancras home when it needed more space.
This created the opportunity to redevelop the space left by the Library in Robert Smirke's 19th-century central quadrangle into the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court.
The Great Court presented me with a perfect opportunity to photograph the intermingling of different architectural styles. It has taken me a while to take pictures of the building. It lends itself nicely to photographs, but I wanted to do something different from photographing the obvious.
In the end, I did photograph the obvious, and there isn’t really anything wrong with that. What’s staring you in the face, no matter how many times it’s been photographed, is sometimes hard not to photograph.
What drew me to the Great Court is the roof. For me, it’s the link between the round Reading Room building in the centre to the rest of the Museum. It reflects the rainy disposition of Britain while protecting the Museum visitors.
It’s one of the very few buildings that lend itself to both black and white or colour. Very few places have this quality. I have only photographed it in colour, but plan to go back and take some black and white.