The manager had the best spot on the street: feet planted, hand on hip, watching three other men do the actual work. Two were up in a green cherry picker prodding at the glass of the HSBC building, and a third leaned on a rail inside and watched them. That’s two layers of supervision for…

Pull the river back a few metres and London grows a beach. I caught this stretch of Thames foreshore at low tide, the water was a proper builder’s-tea brown, the City stacked up behind like someone had emptied a box of glass towers. I love springer spaniels, so I had to photograph this.

We’d come out of the train station at Liverpool Street earlier in the morning but when I walked past here, I stopped dead on Bishopsgate, tilted the camera straight up, and watched three towers race each other into a sky that looked like it was about to pick a fight. The central building’s white steel…

I’m not sure what was so engrossing on that phone but I suspect it was a review of images, especially outside the Bank of England in London and those enormous Portland stone columns. A perfect place for a dramatic photoshoot.

This is what I love about shooting London with a telephoto lens. You compress the layers of the city together and suddenly the relationship between people and architecture becomes absurd.

A man and a woman look along the shoreline of the Thames in London, probably for old pieces of pipe which are common along there. Above us was the modern Blackfriars Railway Bridge, and of course off in the distance is the London skyline.