Urban Trees 2

St.Petersburg

A couple of paired photographs from the emerging "urban trees" series.

We visited St. Petersburg in 2018. As usual, my partner had a professional gig there and I tagged along, curious to visit Russia for the first time after so many years of working with Russian-language books. As it happened, it was during the run-up to the FIFA World Cup, held in several locations in Russia that summer including St. Petersburg, and I got the impression that the city had been cleaned up and told to be on its best behaviour. St. Petersburg is traditionally a very westward-looking city, and – were it not for the cyrillic signs and the mega-capacity drainpipes (oh, and the crashed, abandoned cars on every other street corner) – I could have been persuaded I was in Lisbon or Amsterdam, as some tattooed and pierced youngster brought me a green tea and interpreted the chalked "specials" on a blackboard above the stripped-wood counter. The trees on the left are on the boundary of the Summer Garden (Letnyi Sad), seemingly making way for a view of the Koronny (crown) Fountain. The ones on the right, by contrast, are blocking the view of the utterly bonkers Saviour on the Spilled Blood church (Spas na krovi).

Below are a pair of night-time photographs from London's South Bank in November 2015. I was "in town", as we provincials say, to see Keith Jarrett at the Royal Festival Hall with a party of friends. It was a memorable night, and very cold. There's something special about a cold, crisp night in London, when the city is just starting to get en fête for the Christmas season: the excitement is still fresh and palpable, so that "going out" has an extra edge. The South Bank of the Thames is one of the main congregations of theatres, concert halls, and galleries and so has particular reason to get dressed up. The riverside trees have to put up with multiple impositions – being draped with lights, and forced to share their space with stalls and fairground rides – but manage to maintain their dignity throughout.

London, South Bank