Photographer Andy Hall​’s atmospheric new series captures the capital’s eerie financial heart

For the past seven years the Observer photographer Andy Hall has been wandering the City of London with his camera – post-Brexit, through the eerie emptiness of the pandemic and beyond – to document the changing faces of the capital’s former citadel; home to about 8,000 people, daily workplace for about 600,000 more. His pictures, now collected in a fabulous book, The Same for Everyone, examine the atmosphere and soul of the engine of the British economy, with its exposed Roman foundations and its thicket of tabloid-named towers (the Cheesegrater, the Gherkin, the Walkie-Talkie) jostling for head space above the vaults of the Bank of England.

This 2023 image of a gaggle of City visitors with the peak of the Shard behind them conjures some of the airier strangeness of that landscape, in which bright minds spend long days at terminals trying to bend figures in their favour. The group here appear to have come upon this odd civilisation unexpectedly and are in search of bearings and landmarks.