The Gardens at Six in the Evening

Swindon’s Old Town Gardens on a June evening. The bowling club was still in session — men in white windbreakers moving deliberately across a perfect square of green. The ivy on the garden walls was doing what ivy does in June. The clock tower puddle reflection was waiting to be found.

A two-hour walk with a camera through a familiar place that turned out to contain more fine art and portrait material than most purpose-built locations.

ARCHITECTURE AND FINE ART

The clock tower puddle reflection is the session’s defining image: the cream-coloured octagonal tower with its gold Roman numerals, dark pyramidal roof, inverted and floating in a shallow puddle of rainwater. The near-perfect reflection, the green tree canopy framing it precisely.

THE BOWLING CLUB AND THE GARDEN

The bowling club sequence produced the session’s most compositionally resolved documentary image: three bowls in the foreground at grass level, the club members as out-of-focus verticals in the background. The road signpost standing in the middle of the formal garden — A361 DEVIZES and A420 MARLBOROUGH — reads as surreal against the hedgerows.

A white metal signpost in the manicured garden, displaying route directions — surreal against the formal hedgerows

The white curved amphitheatre — Old Town Gardens, Swindon, June 2025