I grew up in Nottingham. I'm proud of that - fiercely so, in the way that only someone from a place that's perpetually underrated can be. Nottingham gave me loyalty, stubbornness, and an identity that no amount of time in London will ever overwrite. But if I'm being honest about what shaped my taste - the way I see things, the standards I hold, the instinct for what's good and what's merely fine - that was London. That has always been London.
Not in a romantic, "the city changed me" kind of way. In a practical, daily, unavoidable way. London exposed me to food, design, people, and culture at a density and variety that rewired how I process everything. Fifteen years of it. And now, when I build things, London is in every decision I make.
The food scene as education
London's restaurant scene is, quietly, one of the best in the world. I know people will argue for Tokyo, New York, Paris. Those are great cities for food. But London has something none of them quite match: range within walking distance. Japanese, Ethiopian, Peruvian, Lebanese, Cantonese, Tamil - often on the same street. Sometimes in the same market. The sheer variety is staggering, and if you pay attention, it trains you.
Not just your palate, though it does that. It trains your eye for authenticity. You learn to spot the difference between a restaurant that genuinely understands its cuisine and one that's performing it for an audience. You learn that the best places rarely look the flashiest. You learn that care and craft often hide behind modest exteriors. These are design lessons disguised as lunch.
Oishii London - my Japanese restaurant guide - exists because of this. It isn't a project I invented. It's a project that was already happening inside my head every time I tried a new izakaya or tracked down the best tonkotsu in Zone 2. The obsession was already there. The project just gave it a home.
Design everywhere
If you walk through London with your eyes open - properly open, not just navigating from A to B - the city is an ongoing design education. It never stops teaching you.
The Barbican is a masterclass in brutalist architecture that somehow feels warm. The Tube map is one of the most influential pieces of information design ever created - Harry Beck solved a problem in 1931 that designers still reference nearly a century later. The signage at the Southbank Centre, the typography on Victorian pub frontages, the hand-painted lettering at Borough Market - every surface is communicating something about craft, about era, about intention.
Even the accidental design is brilliant. The way terraced houses create rhythm on a street. The way a red bus against grey brick creates a colour palette you could build an entire brand from. The way neon signs in Soho sit alongside Georgian doorways and somehow it all works. London isn't a designed city in the way Tokyo or Copenhagen is. It's a layered city, a collage, and the collage is what makes it endlessly interesting.
I think this is why my projects never look the same. Each one has its own aesthetic, its own mood, its own palette. That approach didn't come from a design philosophy I read somewhere. It came from living in a city where every neighbourhood looks different and that difference is the whole point.
Five projects, one city
When I look at my project list, London is everywhere. Little London is a guide for families - what to do with a young child on weekends in this city. The London Pub Guide is exactly what it sounds like: the best pubs, curated with the obsessiveness of someone who has spent years finding them. Oishii London maps the Japanese food scene. First Out tells you which carriage to board so you're nearest the exit at your destination - a piece of London knowledge that locals hoard like currency.
Even the Forest Quiz - my Nottingham Forest project - gets watched in London pubs. I sit in a pub in Stoke Newington or Bermondsey, Forest on the screen, surrounded by the city that shaped everything else I have built. Nottingham loyalty, London context. Both matter.
Five projects, one city. And the city isn't just the backdrop. It's the content source, the testing ground, and the reason the projects feel authentic. I didn't research London to build these things. I lived London, and the projects are the output.
The magazine shop pilgrimage
There's a specific type of London shop that shaped my taste more than any job, any campaign, any brief I ever worked on. The independent magazine shop.
Magma in Clerkenwell. Artwords on Rivington Street. Donlon Books in Broadway Market. These places were - and some still are - temples of curation. Tiny shops packed with publications you had never heard of, from countries you had never visited, about subjects you didn't know you cared about. Japanese design magazines. Independent zines about architecture. Quarterly journals about food culture. Photography monographs that cost more than a decent dinner.
I would spend hours in these places. Not buying everything - though I bought more than I should have - but flipping, scanning, absorbing. Learning what good layout looks like by seeing hundreds of examples. Understanding how typography creates mood before a single word registers. Developing an instinct for what's considered versus what's lazy by holding both in my hands and feeling the difference.
This was my graduate education in taste. Not a university course, not a design school, not a tutorial. A pilgrimage through London's independent bookshops, month after month, year after year, until the accumulated exposure became an instinct I couldn't switch off. I still can't walk past a good magazine shop without going in. The collector instinct runs too deep.
Nottingham made me loyal. It gave me Forest, it gave me roots, it gave me an identity I'll carry forever. London made me curious. It gave me range, exposure, standards, and an insatiable appetite for the new, the overlooked, the brilliant thing hiding in plain sight.
Both are essential. I wouldn't be who I'm without either. But the taste - the actual mechanism by which I decide what to build, how to design it, what to include and what to leave out - that is London. Every project carries this city in its DNA. Every colour choice, every curatorial decision, every moment where I thought "this needs to be better" and went back to fix it - that instinct was built here. Walking these streets. Eating this food. Browsing these shops. Paying attention.
That's the entire methodology. And it never stops working.
