Every year, for one weekend in September, Faversham gets a little bit… chaotic.

The Faversham Hop Festival takes over the town, filling the streets with live music, dancing, singing, drinking and quite a lot of people having a very good time.

And when I say it takes over the town, I mean it.

I live right in the centre of Faversham, in a small, slightly quirky property that dates back to the 1690s. During Hop Festival weekend, the festival is quite literally outside my window.

I can look out and see thousands of people wandering through the streets, dancing, singing, drinking and generally enjoying themselves.

I graduated in 2000 with a degree in Visual Communication, specialising in Illustration.

My world at the time was almost entirely monochrome. Pencil, pen, line, shadow and texture. I loved drawing, and I was good at it, but I graduated into a world where there simply wasn't much demand for illustrators.

The harder truth was that I wasn't yet good enough to make a living from it.

That was a bitter pill to swallow.

The Sound Mirrors at Dungeness were built in the late 1920s, these enormous concrete structures were an early attempt to detect incoming aircraft. Before radar changed everything, the mirrors were designed to collect and concentrate the sound of approaching aircraft engines, allowing observers to listen for the enemy long before they could be seen.

We'd raid the toy box, choose a few unsuspecting characters, then get down on the floor and photograph them from their perspective. A simple change in viewpoint suddenly made them feel alive. A plastic dinosaur became a towering beast. A tiny action figure became a hero. Everyday objects transformed into entire worlds.

Some photographic trips are meticulously planned weeks in advance. Others begin with a quiet thought the night before and a spontaneous decision to set the alarm for a time that most people would consider the middle of the night.

This was one of those.

The location was somewhere rather special to me. The Isle of Grain, on the Kent coast, feels far more remote than most places in the county. It's a landscape that feels almost forgotten; vast skies, mudflats, sea defences, and remnants of Britain's military past scattered along the shoreline.

I arrived early to the Nakba Day protest in London on Saturday 16th May, something that is very unlike me, while organisers and volunteers were still setting up along Exhibition Road. At first, the streets felt unusually calm, almost hesitant, with small groups gathering beneath grey skies and the occasional flag catching the wind. But that quietness did not last long.

There’s something about getting somewhere early that I’ve always loved. Maybe it’s habit, maybe it’s excitement, or maybe I’m just a bit strange. Either way, when I headed to the Malle Beach Race on Margate Beach on Saturday 9th May, I made sure I got the train ridiculously early so I’d have hours to spare before the event even started.

There were, in fact, two major protests unfolding that day. One, organised with the support of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, called for an end to the ongoing devastation in Gaza and voiced opposition to the escalating conflict involving Iran. It began in Exhibition Road, just outside the Natural History Museum, before moving through the city towards Trafalgar Square. The atmosphere was already electric, placards raised high, chants echoing through the streets, and a collective determination that was impossible to ignore.

On January 18th 2025, thousands gathered in London for the National Demonstration for Palestine, a movement calling for justice, peace, and an end to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It was a day filled with passion, solidarity, and an unwavering demand for truth to be told. Despite the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of the protest, the event was marred by an aggressive and disproportionate police response, leading to 77 shocking arrests of non-violent demonstrators.

On the 22nd April 2025 I took my 15 year old daughter and her boyfriend on their first proper Urbex (urban exploration) mission, and what better place to kick it off than Grain Battery Tower?

I didn’t wake up one day and decide to be an anarchist. It wasn’t a rebellion for rebellion’s sake, or some teenage reaction against authority. It was a slow realisation, built up over years of watching the same story play out over and over, regardless of which party had the keys to Number 10.

Politics has always had a flair for distraction. When the walls start closing in and the public begins to ask difficult questions, like why schools are underfunded, why hospitals are overcrowded, or why wages stagnate while the cost of living soars, the political elite reach for their oldest trick in the book: scapegoating.

On Saturday 19th July, I joined an estimated 80,000 people in central London for the National March for Palestine. The forecast promised torrential rain, and for once, it didn’t disappoint. From the moment I stepped off the train, the sky unleashed its fury, but not even relentless downpours could drown out the voices calling for justice and an end to the suffering in Gaza.

On Saturday 6th September 2025, the usually calm and welcoming market town of Faversham, Kent was shaken. For the past five years that I’ve called this place home, it has felt like a community rooted in acceptance and kindness. But this weekend, that sense of safety was put to the test.

There is a comforting myth many of us cling to in times of mass violence, that silence is safety, that saying nothing keeps our hands clean. It doesn’t. Silence has never been neutral, and it has never protected the vulnerable. It has only always protected power.

When people first learn that I specialize in black and white nude photography, they often assume it’s a stylistic statement. A creative flair. Maybe an attempt to be dramatic or artsy. And sure, I love the timelessness and honesty of monochrome imagery, but the real reason runs quite a bit deeper.