Construction in London is booming. The city's anticipating a stunning 56 percent increase in tall building development this year, while housing costs continue to skyrocket. Lewis Bush creates a moody vision of London's rapid change in the series Metropole.
Bush spent two months last winter wandering the city at night, stopping whenever he came across a new high rise or construction site. He took multiple exposures of half-finished architecture, creating gritty labyrinths of endless steel and glass. He worked after dark because that's when he had some free time, and found it provided cover against security guards who may not take kindly to a stranger with a camera. Sometimes he would return to a location and find it completely transformed.
"The changes would be pretty staggering," he says. "And even just in the space of two months entire buildings could appear or disappear, streets would open or close, and the skyline would change."
Born and raised in the city, Bush was used to seeing high rises and cranes crowding the sky in central London, but now finds the expansion creeping outward. That's led to gentrification as working- and middle-class families are driven out by the higher cost of living. It's also led to the loss of historic and unique architecture. Bush knows many young people who are thinking of leaving the city because it is too expensive. The photographer’s series and corresponding photo book offer a dark premonition of London’s future.
"One day I think a lot of people are going to wake up and realize London has become an incredibly boring place to live, full of unremarkable steel and glass buildings, occupied by dull, grey people," he says.
