Mark Adams awakens to a series of church bells repeatedly ranting from across the street. He stands up, walks over to his camera mounted on a tripod next to the window and waits. Like a detective, he scans for his subjects and is on the alert for a moment where something human shimmers like a jewel, something of a quality that embraces the concept of London as a city, a people. He waits. Unlike a detective, he has no suspects, no crime to solve, but perhaps a wide spectrum of protagonists and antagonists fused into an undefined grain of secrets, lies, transparency and truth. He waits. It is drizzling outside. A couple walk a long stretch of wet pavement in London haste.

“Cities, unlike villages and small towns are plastic by nature. We mould them in our images: they, in turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to impose our own personal form on them. In this sense, it seems to me that living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.” Jonathan Raban, Soft City, 1974.