A pigeon interrupts the view at Tate Modern

On interruption, attention, and a good-looking London pigeon.

Mehrdad Aref-Adib

I took this photograph quite a few years ago.

London is doing what it always does, presenting itself as coherent. The Thames and St Paul’s are in the frame. Cranes hover at the edges, signalling a future already approved.

This is the view on offer.

Then a pigeon enters the frame and the order shifts.

It stands so close that the city recedes, architecture reduced to context. A common feral pigeon, its neck catching purples and greens in the late afternoon light. Its red eye meets the camera without hesitation.

What was meant to be background becomes subject.

London’s pigeons have been part of the city for almost a thousand years. They are descendants of rock doves that escaped from Norman dovecotes in the years after 1066, and they have watched London grow ever since.

Feeding them in Trafalgar Square was once an everyday ritual, a shared public scene. Today feeding is banned and their numbers are managed. Yet pigeons remain at home in every alley and on every palace roof, untroubled by monuments or rules.

In 2024, the London Museum adopted the pigeon as its logo, a quiet acknowledgment that this disregarded bird has witnessed the city’s life longer than many of the institutions that now seek to define it.

Their presence predates the buildings and monuments that now claim to define the city.

This is not just a photograph of London. It is a photograph of interruption.

A few years on, that interruption feels truer than ever.

I pressed the shutter.

© Mehrdad Aref-Adib 2025