Midnight Tram
Midnight Tram was made in Edinburgh’s docklands. The Shore, beside the Port of Leith. Most of it sits around Lower Drawbridge. It’s a pedestrian bridge. It was closed for years. You stopped thinking about it because you couldn’t use it.
I knew the work was finished. I was waiting for light. Not pretty light. Just the kind that holds a frame together. Street lamps. Wet ground. Hard edges.
One September night, close to midnight, I saw Haar through the window. Sea fog. It comes in fast. It flattens distance. It wipes the background clean. I thought of Lower Drawbridge and went to check. The bridge was open.
Down there, the city was stripped to basics. Lamp glare. Timber underfoot. Steel overhead. Tram wires fading into nothing. The bridge felt like a corridor. The fog did the rest.
The tram arrived and vanished. It looked unreal in Haar. Headlights turned into a glow. Then a line. Then nothing. People became silhouettes. They were there for a second. Then they were gone.
This series is about silence cutting through the city. Not emptiness. Just a moment when the noise drops away. You see structure. Lines. Spacing. Repetition. Light that can’t escape.
Haar doesn’t add atmosphere. It removes it. It leaves what matters. The bridge. The wires. The lamps. The tram moving through a city that suddenly feels still.
Captured at Musselburgh Pier on a day that felt unmistakably Scottish. The light was unstable, shifting between brief sun and rising wind. Within minutes the sky began to close in, darkening as a storm gathered offshore.
Nothing dramatic happened, and that was the point. The scene existed in a moment of suspension, between calm and disruption. A quiet sense of drift, not just in the landscape, but in the atmosphere itself.
The photograph shows a dense layer of mussel shells accumulated along the eastern side of the Fisherrow Harbour, carried and deposited by repeated tidal movement. Over time, the shoreline has been shaped less by human intention and more by slow, indifferent forces.
At times, looking at this image, I find myself thinking about the origin of the name Musselburgh. Whether coincidence or not, the landscape seems to quietly hold its own explanation, written not in words, but in matter, repetition, and erosion.