Mark Chilvers - PhotoCity London

Its almost 11am and the sound of horses hooves echoes down The Mall. The horses are each wearing a breastplate and carrying a soldier dressed in a red tunic with a white-plumed helmet: theyre the Queens Life Guards and this is the daily Changing of the Queens Life Guards, one of Londons most famous (and photographed) ceremonies. Youll find some photos of the Life Guards among these pages but this is a book about so much more than a tourism tick-list of the British capitals highlights.

Our goal was to chronicle a day in the life of this great city from the perspective of a photographer who knows and loves it. We wanted to present not just the famous sights but also Londons daily rhythms as a local would experience them. The book is loosely organised according to the passage of a day and night in the city: we start with a brave early-morning swim in the Serpentine lake of Hyde Park and finish with a night of live music and dance in south London. Along the way we follow the photographer on his peregrinations through Londons diverse neighbourhoods, exploring their signature experiences, from tailoring and high finance to famed food markets, hidden gardens, local pubs and Londons great galleries and museums. It would be impossible to capture all of Londons incomparable variety but readers will discover a side to London beyond the famous sights.

For a task of this scale, we sought a photographer for whom London was not just home, but a source of inspiration. Mark Chilvers who lives in Camberwell, south London took his first portrait at the age of six and it was the start of a journey that led to him becoming a staff photographer at the Independent newspaper (then based in Canary Wharf). For me, says Mark, photography is a way of slowing down to observe the world around me, while also asking myself to make creative sense of the citys chaos. Helping Mark make sense of London was caption-writer Joe Bindloss, a Lonely Planet writer and editor whose first taste of London was a childhood living on the Caledonian Road. As well as writing about London, Joe has written for more than 50 guidebooks to Asia, Europe, Africa and Australia but between overseas hops he can often be found close to home in the ocakba (Turkish grill houses) of northeast London.

Between them, they photographed and described all these facets of London life. The result is this chronologically-ordered visual odyssey through one of the worlds great cities, a taste of London that may give first-time visitors fresh ideas of what to see and do, and also inspire long-time lovers of London to make another trip to The Big Smoke.