Empty city streets have always fascinated me, filled me with an emotion I cannot name.

My first exposure to this phenomenon—and when I first recognised it—was in London in the mid-1970s. Walking through the back streets towards Baker Street (to check out Sherlock’s abode, of course) generated this feeling of emptiness, of spaciousness, of loneliness, of the lack of life, human or otherwise.

A decade later, the same emotions arose, but in a different set of back streets.

Since then the feelings have come and gone as I explored and wondered the back streets of various cities around the world.

Always that feeling of emptiness and loneliness; of something alien.

Back streets at night are even more poignant and emotive.

Empty street scene at night with bike racks in the foreground

There, diffused in artificial light, buried in shadows, fading into the black background, is the architecture of the absent working world: vacant bike racks, deserted streets, empty footpaths, silent coffee shops, soundless offices and customerless shops.

Counterpoised against this architecture of construction is the architecture of nature: planted trees, beds of wilted flowers, dried lawns. The constructed enhanced—and humanised— by nature. But there is nothing natural about this artificial entwining of the built and the grown. What is constructed is an overwhelming tension between the vacant now, the immoderate past and the dormant future.

Sometimes though, in this shadowed world of greys and blacks, are the signs and symbols of expressed life and half finished work.

Night scene of wall with graffite

A workman’s ladder and shovel in an empty building. Graffiti. Sometimes a discarded bottle or can. Detritus of life; past life in progress; future life suspended in the unfinished past. Entropy facilitating time and life.

Yet these empty, dark, silent streets are not always so alien, so half-filled with life. Often they are also the backdrop to tragedy and comedy, to anguish and joy, to forgiveness and error, to compassion and hate. Private—or not so private—emotions shared in a public space. Hidden, but apparent to those who see.

Couple hugging in a street at night

Backdrop or not, empty, shadowed, back streets reflect the emptiness and shadowed cosmos in which we dwell. Perhaps, for me, they also reflect the inevitable emptiness and shadowless void of death which awaits me as it does all of us. Maybe this is why I am ambivalent towards such scenes: life hidden in the shadows of death.

Life is perverse.