Ringroad looks at both the material form of the ring road settlements and the life that exists therein and seeks to explore the relationship between the two. As humans, we make society and its structures and at the same time are constrained and shaped by them. Society and its structures and human action cannot be looked at separately.

All the pictures were made alongside the ring road that surrounds the City of Oxford. For many, when they think of Oxford, they think of a landscape of historic buildings, inhabited and used by students and academics, but there is another landscape to the city, and other people, no less important and no less vital and creative.

These landscapes, and others around England, (for most cities and large settlements have a ring road or a bypass), are referred to alternatively as the ‘margins’,‘interzones’, ‘between town and country’ or the ‘rurban fringe’.

They barely exist in the imagination of most. When they are referred to, are characterised by emptiness, traveller sites, allotments, cemeteries and low cost housing developments, where solitudes coexist. These pictures seek to show that for those people that live in these areas, there is a freedom to explore their imaginations and a vitality uncommon to those that are in the centre of the city

When some scholars did some research into which landscape images were most popular, they discovered that tidy and orderly landscapes were admired. A landscape should be calming, with features such as a slow moving stream or a peaceful deer park. The English do not applaud geometrical features but they do like orderliness, nostalgic features and certainly nothing that represents functionality

The margins are the antithesis of this aesthetic. Where there is vegetation, tidiness is absent and more likely there will be a blaze of untended and invasive species. But, the margins are questionably the landscapes of our time, with their branch offices and large superstores and industrial works, where most of the work that impacts on our community is done. If you were to visit most city centres today, it is unlikely that you would get an understanding of the local economy. But in the margins you will find much of the apparatus without which a settlement would not work.

This project is ongoing.