Chinatown, London - A photo essay in the heat.

We weren't in London for photography. We were there for a passport office.

My son's emergency passport appointment had us waiting around central London yesterday, in the kind of heat that makes the pavement shimmer. With time to kill and nowhere in particular to be, we drifted into Chinatown. No plan, no theme — just a Leica M10 round my neck and a DJI Nano tucked in my pocket for something faster and looser, a short-form POV video to go alongside the stills.

A Different Kind of Errand

There's a particular restlessness to killing time in a city. You're not shooting a project, you're just present, camera in hand, waiting to see what the street hands you. Chinatown handed us plenty.

The heat had a way of slowing everyone down and speeding the street up at the same time — lanterns hanging still in windless air, awnings throwing hard shadows across the pavement, and underneath it all the usual London churn: delivery bikes, market stalls, tourists, locals, everyone moving through the same few hundred metres of Gerrard Street for entirely different reasons.

It was a hive of activity, and every corner of the world seemed to be represented in it.

Four Corners, One Street

That's really what stayed with me. Chinatown isn't just Chinese — it's a compression of the whole city into a handful of streets. Cantonese and Mandarin over the counters, but also Spanish, Italian, Japanese, half a dozen accents I couldn't place, all folding into each other in the queue for bubble tea or the doorway of a dim sum spot. Nobody there was performing London. They were just living in it, in whatever language and however they'd carried it with them.

That's the bit of this country I never stop being grateful for. You don't have to go looking for the world — in a place like this, it comes to you, and it does so without ceremony.

Shooting Loose

The M10 did what it always does — quiet, quick, unobtrusive, good in the kind of scattered light you get under those red arches. But the Nano was the more interesting exercise. Shooting POV, low and close, running alongside the stills rather than instead of them, gave a different texture entirely — less considered, more immediate, closer to how the afternoon actually felt than any single frame could manage on its own.

No theme, no brief, no real intention beyond paying attention. Sometimes that's the whole job.

Until next time, keep snapping.

Trans Pride Brighton, July 2026

A Chilled Day. An Unchilled Moment.

Why Brighton

There are cities that tolerate difference and cities that are built from it. Brighton is the latter.

It has been a refuge and a gathering point for LGBTQ+ communities for decades — longer than most of the legislation designed to protect them. The Kemptown scene, the annual Pride in August, the sheer density of queer life woven into the fabric of the place. Brighton doesn't perform acceptance. It simply gets on with it.

Trans Pride Brighton has been part of that fabric since 2013, when a small group of organisers decided that trans people deserved a dedicated space within the broader Pride calendar — not a footnote, not a float, but a march of their own. It was one of the first events of its kind in the UK, and it has grown every year since.

What has also grown, in the years since, is the noise around trans rights in Britain. The political temperature, the media coverage, the Supreme Court rulings, the parliamentary debates. The bathroom signs. The wee.

Against that backdrop, a chilled day in Brighton is a political act whether it intends to be or not.

Open as Usual

What struck me on the day was how relaxed it was. Not passive — the signs were sharp, the flags were flying, the drum lines were going — but there was no tension in the crowd. People were dancing. People were eating ice lollies in the July heat. People were dressed exactly as they wanted to be dressed, moving through the city centre as though it belonged to them.

Because, for the afternoon, it did.

The city largely carried on around the edges of it. Bars stayed open. Shoppers paused to watch from the pavements. One banner above a pub doorway read Open as Usual — not a protest sign, just a pub doing what pubs do — but it landed as something else entirely. Business as usual. Life as usual. That's all anyone was asking for.

"Be careful what you hate. It might be someone you love."

That sign, hand-painted and carried through the street, is both a plea and a warning. It also happens to be accurate.

The Signs

Street photography at a march is its own discipline. You're not making the event; you're reading it. And what a march says through its placards and banners is often more revealing than anything a speech could manage.

"Dead Before Detransition." A large black flag, carried by a young person in camo trousers and coloured trainers, held high above the crowd. The weight of that phrase is considerable. It is not hyperbole — it is testimony. And it landed.

"If my wee wins you votes, Britain needs a stronger drink." Cardboard, marker pen, absolute precision. The bathroom debate — the idea that trans people's use of public toilets represents some kind of threat — has been deployed by politicians across the spectrum as a wedge issue. This sign answered it in eleven words. Brighton laughed. Brighton usually does.

The Pedigree

Trans Pride Brighton is free to attend. It is community-organised. It has no corporate sponsors headlining the stage, no VIP enclosures, no branded lanyards. It is, in that sense, closer to what Pride was originally — a march, a gathering, a refusal to be invisible.

That it takes place in Brighton is appropriate. The city has always understood that visibility is not vanity. It is survival.

The people who turned out on the 18th of July were not making a statement at anyone. They were living their lives on a sunny Friday afternoon, in a city that has always made room for exactly that.

The camera just happened to be there.

Until next time, keep marching