I grew up in Bath.
I moved away.
Then returned later in life with my family to set down roots.
The city hosts five million visitors each year. An economy powered by heritage and cultural tourism makes it one the most photographed places in the world.
The transient nature of tourism means the flood of images on Instagram, travel-vlogs and magazines are the same picture postcard scenes repeated again and again; a Georgian Crescents, the Roman Baths, a medieval Abbey.
A real city – the cities people experience everyday – do not look like picture postcards.
As twenty-twenty-one rolled in the realities of another year of the pandemic became depressingly clear.
I needed a project that would survive a set of ever shifting lock-down rules and provide some form of active meditation and calm.
The project was simple. I joined the growing community of people determined to walk every street of their hometowns.
In March twenty-twenty-one I bought a Collins A-to-Z street atlas and red sharpie and started to mark my progress.
Over the next few months the A-to-Z dominated my spare-time.
Walking the city is as much a treasure hunt as it is a pilgrimage.
I would plan walks to cross out specific areas only to find tangles of paths leading off to areas I never knew existed.
Alongside the rigid markings of A-to-Z I found desire paths, ugly and unique buildings tucked away down side streets and unintentional patterns, rhythm and repetition in my images.
The everyday city ended up as a quirky living thing distant from the glossy-tourist facade for which it is known.
Thomas is a photographer based in the South West of England. His work is focused around every-day infrastructure and the intersection of urban and rural spaces. His images aims to explore what we see as landscape and how the differing environments from natural to man-made influence and affect our perceptions and emotions towards the real and natural world.
© Text and pictures by Thomas James
