I'm not a great lover of themed exhibitions. I much prefer to do my own thing. However when the Arena group had the opportunity to hang in the Barbican Centre - just too good to miss, the curator wanted a unifying subject. The title of the exhibition that we arrived at - "Routes" was open to interpretation and very challenging. A route has a beginning, a middle and an end, and my first thoughts was to search out these aspects, in the form of terminals and stations, and the people setting out on, and completing their journeys. It then occurred to me that, within these places there were also beginnings and middles and ends, so the challenge became to portray the complexity of the place and its transience in a single image.

All of these images were constructed from several exposures on a single negative, using cards in front of the lens to blank out areas of the frame where I could add another exposure or two - or three or more! Developing the film was always something of an adventure, never being entirely sure what I had got. It certainly tested my compositional skills as well as my memory. Serendipity played its part also, and the technique seemed well suited to the busy bustling noisy environment.

As I printed the pictures, the several of the alternative titles that we had considered for the exhibition were running through my head and formed themselves into the little poem below the gallery. The last line is my own, and became the title of this body of work - "The ever running tide of humanity".

               From A to B                                                            From A to Zee                                                      From here to there... and back


          Coming and going                                               Ebbing and flowing                                    The ever running tide of humanity