Husna Rizvi speaks to architectural photographer Lewis Bush about how powerful developers are altering the social and political fabric of the city.

It’s uncontroversial to say that the city of London is a patchwork of cranes, high-rises and strangely sterile luxury flat blocks that seem unoccupied even when they’re not. Londoners live on precarious wages and insecure employment. They’re also bombarded with advertisements that rebrand the corporate clamour for land as a mark of civilizational progress.

We spoke to Lewis Bush, author and architectural photographer, whose photo series Metropole seeks to disrupt such narratives and expose the alienation that a highly corporatized city can breed.

Where did the idea for this project come about?

I moved back to London after being away for a while and was shocked at the way the city had changed. Over the next couple of years I just started photographing it and became more and more staggered by what was going on and what was being approved.

There’s been a huge community backlash to the redevelopment schemes which are basically seen as – to use that rather tricky term – social cleansing

The city is in a way being reshaped before my eyes by a relatively small and unaccountable group of people.

What was London like before that point?

The London I grew up in was a different place for a lot of different reasons. Obviously land in London has always been valuable – but there wasn’t quite the same clamour that you see now.

I can remember as a kid there were bomb sites left over from the war, which seems incredible now, because it seems like every available piece of land is being built on. It had these empty spaces, these derelict buildings. That has disappeared and it’s had the effect of pushing out people who maybe would’ve made use of those buildings, whether it’s artists with studios or people converting them to low cost housing. So it’s altered the fabric of the city but it’s also altered the character of the people who live here.