Northstowe is my current home. It is one of Britain's newest towns, taking shape on the site of the former RAF Oakington airfield, between the city of Cambridge and the wide horizons of the Fen edge. It is a landscape in transition, where traces of military history and agricultural boundaries are giving way to streets, homes and a new community.
New Town, Old School is an ongoing personal photographic project documenting that transformation. Every image is made with a Pentax MX or ME Super, the majority using a 50mm lens, all on black and white 35mm film. The negatives are developed by hand using Caffenol — a developer made from coffee, washing soda and vitamin C. In an age of digital cameras, drones and instant images, the process is deliberately slow, tactile and uncompromising.
Northstowe represents the future: a planned town designed for a changing world. The photographs are created using techniques that belong to an earlier era, methods that demand patience and reward careful observation. They bring with them their own imperfections and unexpected results.
Rather than documenting construction alone, these photographs explore the spaces in between — the temporary landscapes, the remnants, the finished alongside the not quite yet, the edges where old and new coexist, and the everyday moments that will one day become the town's collective memory. The result is not simply a record of buildings appearing from the landscape, but a meditation on time itself: on how places are built, remembered and eventually become history.