Dawson’s Heights is an early 1970s social housing project in south London designed by the then very young Edinburgh architect Kate Macintosh. The ziggurat shaped estate is of quite astonishing architectural design, and is widely regarded as one of the most remarkable housing developments in the country. Even more amazing are the views over towards London, which you can see here!

This is a panorama looking north east towards central London, many kilometres away, with St Paul’s at left and The City in the middle. If you look very closely, you can see Tower Bridge also, just to the right of the last skyscraper of The City, with in front Butler’s Wharf; this is hard to pick out with the image scaled down to this size but it is clearly visible in the full sized original – contact me to see full sized crops of this image.

I used a 420mm focal length for this view (my super sharp 300mm f2,8 lens with a 1.4x teleconverter) hence the compressed look, but views like this work really well from a distance with powerful telephoto lenses. I was very careful not to over-saturate the tones in editing this picture, in order to bring the bitterly cold wintery feel and to enhance the steely atmospheric blues, cyans and silver hues.