Begin here.

After an unexpected turn of events I found myself suddenly leaving Europe after almost nine years. Needing a place to land immediately I chose my old hometown of Los Angeles. It was always where I answered that I was from, I had always assumed that it was home.  It was a harder landing than I had expected.

Though it is true that parts of London and Paris have gentrified in the last nine years it is nothing like the scale of change in Los Angeles over the same period. It was as though a city that had fallen asleep in the 1970’s had woken up to an amphetamine fueled rush of civic change. It was not a superficial facelift as happens for the Olympics or a convention but a change in the actual life of the city. Whole new neighborhoods had sprung up –not on the outskirts of sprawl but in the once desolate center. New boulevards, new sky-scrapers, new museums, new parks –a new public transport system. My arrival in this unknown city was coupled with the loss of my grandmother’s home, my Los Angeles anchor; a place where the passage of time really had managed to be suspended. So instead of coming home it became as though I had moved to a city that I might have visited on a vacation long ago. I set myself the task to seek out reminders of the city as I remembered -or at least what the city looked like in my memories.