Midsummer, heavy heat, and London is beside itself: couples kiss by tube station steps, accordion players linger on street corners, the city is alive with the coatless, bare-legged and bewildered. Across the air comes the sound of last orders, police sirens, blurry conversation, while the backstreets stand quiet, lost in the scent of jasmine and dust.
- A couple kissing by the steps of a tube station
Wednesday brought both the longest day of the year and the hottest June weather in four decades, a combination that seemed to intensify the strangeness of these times - when the hours feel precarious, and every morning brings fresh and unfathomable news of tower block fires, terrorist attacks, votes, revelations. There is the sense that the night is no longer a safe place; it is unsettled, unrested, filled with phantoms.
- The glow of a TV though a window flung open wide
In Kensington, close to midnight, the streets around Grenfell Tower have a leaden stillness. Roads blocked, windows flung open, somewhere an Arabic station playing.
- Chatting outside a pub in Kensington, graffiti on a street sign, and a poster appealing for information on missing Jessica Urbano
Outside a newsagent, a group of young men lounge, sharing a joint. They are listless and open and warm, keen to make conversation – about the fact they have never been further than Fulham, about the trials of trying to get council housing, about the desire for a life that is different.
A couple of streets away, amid the makeshift tributes to those lost in the recent fire – the bunches of flowers and cardboard posters tethered to railings – a man quietly draws a piece of paper out of his bag, weights each corner with cans of lager, then sits down on the pavement and begins writing out the lyrics to You’ll Never Walk Alone.
- Omar attaches the tribute to one of the railings
Along the street we find Omar, playing music through his phone, speaking to anyone who will listen. “I haven’t slept properly for five or six days,” he says. “I’ve seen horrific things in my life, but I can’t get this one out of my head. I can hear their screams. I feel shattered, emotionally drained. I can’t go home.” He looks along the road, at the knots of people who cannot sleep, at those quietly walking in the early hours, looking up at the black hulk of the tower. “This is the calm before the storm,” he says, and the night seems to simmer. “You know that don’t you?”
- London leaves its mark on one of its inhabitants
Across the city in Camden the mood is lighter. There are revellers spilling out of late-night bars, sitting drinking on warm pavements, seeking pizza, unsteady on their feet.
- Smoking outside one of the late bars along Chalk Farm Road
Outside the tube, a busker is playing Wonderwall while a crowd sings along, drunk and lusty and unwilling to go home.
Three in the morning, 25 degrees, and Hackney stands in the flickering space between late night stragglers and early risers. The kebab shop workers are serving wraps and cartons of chips, counting their way down to 4.30am.
On the top deck of a night bus a woman sleeps sprawled across two seats, while another, neatly dressed and ready for the day, shades her face and reads her bible.
- A man tries to sleep on a bench
Central London is coming into life now: the stirring of street-sweepers, shop-shutters, service workers making their way across the city. In the soft warmth of the morning the buildings seem to bloom.
- Tish, 25, is a volunteer at the Salvation Army
From Westminster Bridge, the sky is lifting – wild shifts of peach and blue that light up the river and the rooftops and all the windows of parliament.
There is the strange sense of something slipping through: standing in the breeze of the river, somewhere between day and night, watching the morning joggers and the early suits, the lost and the aimless and unslept.
- Writer Laura waiting for the dawn
Then out of nowhere, out of the bright new morning – or perhaps the night now passed – sail two men on a Boris bike: a zig-zagging, half-cut charge towards the south. “Good morning!” cries one as they pass. He is balanced on the handlebars, phone aloft, filming the sunrise. “Good morning!” he shouts again – to us, and the river and the gathering sky, his face lit up, his voice full of laugher, delighted by the new day and all the joys to come.