The journey
During a planned campervan trip around the English coast in November 2025, a good friend and I had mapped out a number of places we felt we had to visit.
Shingle Street, on the Suffolk coast, was high on both of our lists.
We arrived the evening before I made this photograph. It was bitterly cold and completely dark, which meant there was no opportunity to scout the location beforehand.
We parked up believing we had this remote stretch of coast to ourselves.
After dark
Then another van appeared.
In the darkness, the headlights and the hum of its engine broke what had been an eerie silence. It felt slightly unsettling.
Was this another photographer arriving with exactly the same plan for sunrise? Was someone dumping rubbish? Or was our new neighbour there for some entirely different reason?
Curiosity got the better of me.
I walked across to the van and found the traveller sitting inside with a cup of tea, a double mattress laid out on the floor of his old van.
It turned out he wasn't a photographer at all. He had been travelling around the English coastline for almost a month, simply enjoying the countryside and coast.
He had already been at Shingle Street for a couple of days.
Morning
After our conversation, the place suddenly felt a little less remote. I went back to the campervan, considerably more relaxed and excited about what daylight might reveal.
The following morning was every bit as cold as the night before. The shingle itself had frozen together.
Instead of the loose crunch I had expected beneath my feet, the beach felt hard and solid as I walked across it.
And then I finally saw Shingle Street properly.
The photograph
It was everything I had hoped for and more: sparse, quiet and wonderfully suited to the minimalist photograph I had imagined before arriving.
I worked through several compositions that morning and came away with a couple I am very happy with.
This photograph is the one closest to the image I had already formed in my mind before the trip.
Shingle Street became one of the highlights of our week travelling through England.
Beyond the frame
Sometimes the photograph is only part of what remains from a place.
The darkness the night before, our unexpected neighbour, the frozen shingle beneath my feet and finally seeing the landscape emerge in the morning are now inseparable from this image.