25 Great Pulteney Street – Timelapse from Adam Bowie on Vimeo.

Do you ever embark on a project that somehow you never quite get around to completing?

I certainly do. And here, finally, is a project that I’ve completed some six years after I started it.

This begins back in 2010 when I was still working for Absolute Radio in One Golden Square, Soho, London. I sat at the back of the fourth floor, windows behind me looking across the Soho alleyway that is Bridle Lane and towards a building on Great Pulteney Street beyond. The fairly ugly building from the 1960s at 25 Great Pulteney Street had once been home to the agency Starcom Motive. But they’d long moved out, and the building had been empty for at least two years. When Google Street View’s team passed it in 2008, the building was boarded up, and that was still the case by 2010.

Now finally the developers were moving in, and it looked like something was happening with the building. I brought in an old Canon A470 digital camera, bought cheaply on eBay, and loaded a memory card with CHDK – the alternative firmware that would provide my camera with timelapse facilties. I also bought an external power supply and suction camera mount.

Over the next year and a half, between April 2010 and October 2011, I set the camera taking photos – first of the demolition of the building, and then of the new building rising in its place. I wasn’t consistent in either the location of the camera, the frequency of it taking photos, or what it was pointing at. When I went on holiday, I made sure to keep the number of photos a day low to ensure the memory card didn’t fill.

In retrospect, there are a lot of things I’d have done differently, including changing the aspect ratio, the photo size and so on. I was left limited in what I could do with zooming or panning across scenes. The camera was also limited in its angle of view from my window, and the camera was often mounted on a slight angle. The buildings were too close and the lens not wide enough to capture everything in one shot. The window meant reflections, and it wasn’t perfect either – neither clean nor unscratched.

Over the course of having the camera in my window, I had to ensure that cleaners at Absolute didn’t unplug it. The suction of my suction mount would invariably fail over time, and I’d come into work to find the camera on the floor. On one occasion the fall was “fatal” and I bought an identical replacement on eBay to continue the project.

In total I ended up with something like 250,000 photos. I wrangled them into something useable with Quicktime Pro, getting MP4 files from my JPGs. On underpowered PCs, this was a slow process.

Finally I had a collection of 102 files, taking up about 10GB. And then I sat on the videos. I couldn’t say way exactly. I suspect that I found it a little daunting. I knew that there was too much video and it needed editing down, although it wasn’t really a big job. I had to find some music – two tracks. One for the demolition, and another for the new building. I’ve sped many of the clips up further, removed nights for the most part, when as already mentioned, reflections of my office were a problem.

Finally it should be said that this is by no means every minute or day of the building being demolished and rebuilt. But it’s lots of it.

And so it is, that some years after capturing this footage over many many months, I’ve pieced together this video! I hope you enjoy it.

Notes and Further reading:

The front of the building has some interactive railings in a piece called Finial Response designed by Cinimod Studio.