The First Fogs of Autumn, November 2026

November

There is a particular hour in Shoreditch, around seven a.m. on a November Saturday, when the place goes so quiet you could almost believe it had come to its senses. The fog comes in off somewhere (nobody knows where London fog comes from; I suspect it is kept in a big shed in Barking and let out on weekends), and it softens everything, so that even the glass hulks along Great Eastern Street look briefly apologetic. Mixed into it this morning was the smell of last night's bonfires, a rich, acrid, faintly nostalgic tang of wet ash and charred pallet, as if the entire borough had been smoking a pipe and only just put it down. Every few yards I came across a spent rocket stick lying in the gutter like a tiny fallen javelin, and on Arnold Circus someone had left a Catherine wheel nailed to a plane tree, scorched and drooping, a monument to the precise moment a good idea turned out not to be one. For a photographer this is heaven. The light has the texture of porridge, the streets are empty, and the whole of E2 looks like a Brassaï print that has been left out in the rain.

Except, of course, it isn't empty, because I was not the only one who had this idea. Emerging from the murk at intervals, like deer at the edge of a forest, were the hipsters: young men in fisherman's beanies and trousers that stopped some way short of their ankles, each holding an analogue camera with the reverent caution of someone carrying a full bowl of soup in an expensive restaurant. I passed one on Hoxton Square who was trying to meter the fog, which is a bit like trying to weigh a sigh, and another on Redchurch Street who had stopped dead in the road to wind on his Pentax with the slow, theatrical care of a man defusing a bomb. They peered at things. They crouched. They photographed a bin with immense seriousness. I would have felt superior if I hadn't been doing exactly the same thing, with exactly the same camera, and if I hadn't just realised, standing by a smouldering heap of what had once been a sofa, that I'd shot the last eleven frames with the lens cap on………..