Piccadilly Circus

  • Nick Turpin
London’s Piccadilly Circus is a global junction, a place where traffic, trains, people, culture and history meet, synonymous the world over with ‘busyness’ it is matched only in reputation by New York’s Times Square. At the very heart of the biggest city in Europe It is the perfect place for the camera to reveal the nature of globalisation, international tourism, national identity and commercialisation.

Piccadilly Circus, built in 1819 and originally a roundabout with a statue of Eros at it’s centre, unites the theatres of Shaftesbury Avenue with the cinemas of Leicester Square, the shops of Regent Street with the gentleman’s clubs and hotels of St James’s and Piccadilly itself with the Mall and Trafalgar Square.

This doesn’t aim to be a project about Piccadilly Circus however, like many of my street based projects, it aims to be a portrait of the modern western world.