Frank Watson review – ‘recounting the many minor mysteries of fraying English life in tucked-away spots’

Frank Watson, Soundings. Photograph: Frank Watson

If you pass by the Grey Gallery in London Fields right now, you might think the shop front at No. 4 is an estate agency.

Mounted in the window are pictures of pristine houses, freshly painted with manicured gardens.

Then you do a double-take and notice that they have no windows.

For this is no appeal to home-buyers, but photographer Frank Watson’s latest exhibition, Out of Whack.

Off-kilter, on the blink, coming unstuck, out of whack. The slightly antiquated term Watson has picked for this show alludes to the misalignment in our relations with nature.

At the end of a rolling stretch of cropland sits a squat nuclear power station (Sizewell B).

Concrete flood defences crack and crumble under the relentless force of rising seas (Dungeness).

A dreamy estuarine seascape frames an abandoned concrete structure (Thames No 1).

The images in this show are mainly drawn from the series Circling Saturn and Rollercoasting which recount the many minor mysteries of fraying English life in tucked-away spots.

Why does a low concrete building have such a large assemblage of ageing satellite dishes in front of it?

What made that Martello tower fall in on itself?

Watson’s photographs walk the fine line between the banal and the sublime.

Soft light and haze hint at a sense of lost purpose, and one suspects that it is not so much the dilapidated structures depicted that are lost, but the civilisation that built them.

Frank Watson: Out of Whack
Until 9 November 2025
The Grey Gallery
4 Helmsley Place, London Fields, E8 3SB