Flipping through Utopia Ending by Gianluca Calise feels like stepping back into a chunk of my life I had not pieced together until now. From August 2012 to early 2014, I was hopping planes every Sunday from Aberdeen to Heathrow, working as a change and configuration manager on a massive IT rollout for an oil and gas giant. I would land at Terminal 5, watch cranes claw at the sky, and spend my weeks in London, Sunbury-on-Thames, mostly, before jetting back to Scotland each Friday. That first week, I caught the Paralympics opening ceremony fireworks from my hotel window on 29 August 2012, a mad burst of colour over a city that felt both like home and a million miles away. Calise’s book nails that weird mix of London’s relentless churn, its jarring contrasts, and the hollow promises I saw unfolding firsthand. It is not just a photography gem; it is a mirror to those years, and it has got me hooked.

This is not your average photo book. Shot between 2014 and 2019 for The Velvet Cell, Utopia Ending digs into London’s post-2012 Olympics transformation, a city I lived in as it was morphing. Calise’s lens catches the glass towers sprouting like weeds, the cranes that never seemed to sleep, and the quiet erasure of what came before. It is a five-year study that hit me like déjà vu, echoing the sprawl I would see flying in each week, building site after building site, a skyline promising everything but delivering a mixed bag. What gets me, beyond the visuals, is how it wrestles with who this new London’s for. The stats in the essays are brutal: 70% of inner London homes tagged as second properties, a rent-to-earnings ratio at 72% (compared to 29% elsewhere in England), and 2.5 million souls commuting two hours daily because living there is a pipe dream. It is a city turned financial playground, and Calise’s shots make you feel the weight of that shift.

One image that floored me is the beggar outside an Oliver Bonas shop, hat out on the pavement, while a red crane looms over a sleek high-rise in the distance. It is pure London, the kind of scene I’d clock walking to the BP office in Sunbury. You would pass a digital billboard flogging luxury flats, then spot someone homeless a stone’s throw away. That juxtaposition of shiny ambition and stark neglect is the book’s heartbeat. Another shot that hit home shows a row of tenement houses, wooden garage doors creaking with age, one with a rusty old banger parked out front. It is Sunbury in a nutshell, modest homes with kids trudging to school in hand-me-downs, then a corner turn into wealth: posh cars, pristine offices, money dripping everywhere. Calise’s knack for framing these contrasts feels like he was strolling those streets with me, catching the mad dance of old and new, poverty and plenty.

The book has a personal edge because it ties straight to that Olympic buzz I landed in. Those games were sold as London’s big renewal, a utopia on the horizon. I remember the hype, the fireworks, the chatter about regeneration lifting everyone up. But Calise’s work peels back the gloss. His shots of glass-faced buildings under construction, cranes slicing the sky, could have been ripped from my Heathrow descents. They are gorgeous, sure, but there is a chill to them. The title’s ironic as hell, utopia did not end; it never really started. The essays hammer it home: social housing has been gutted, council estates swapped for market-rate towers, and communities shoved out. It is social cleansing dressed up as progress, and I saw the seeds of it, new builds popping up while I wondered how many would sit empty, assets for investors rather than homes for folk.

What makes this book sing is not just the photos, it is how they talk to you. Calise’s got an eye for light and texture that I love as a photography nut. Shadows on a glass façade or the weathered grain of a tenement wall turn into metaphors for London’s layers, history and humanity stacked against cold modernity. Flying in each week, I would muse about how many of those half-built sites might stay abandoned, promises broken by a government that talked big to snag the Olympic bid. Calise’s images of soulless high-rises, reflecting the city but showing no life inside, nail that unease. They are cinematic, precise, and a bit haunting, making you feel the cracks in the façade, the eerie quiet where bustle should be.

London always felt oddly familiar, yet alien compared to Scotland. The same shops, your Tesco’s, and Greggs lined the streets, but the scale, the pace, the sheer difference blew me away. Aberdeen’s granite grit has its own charm, but London’s a beast, sprawling, chaotic, a patchwork of Beijing bits, Dubai smatterings, and New York fragments, as Calise puts it. His words ring true: these new spaces are “non-places,” built for commerce, not living. Walking Sunbury’s streets, I would see that shift, poverty one block, riches the next, a city losing its soul to global cash. The book’s interviews with locals and thinkers like David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre back it up, space here is a commodity, not a necessity, and it is political to its core.

For me, Utopia Ending is not just art, it is a time machine. Those two years in London were a blur of planes, hotels, and that daily trek past rundown houses to plush offices. Calise’s shots take me back, but they also sharpen what I could not pin down then: a city thriving and hollowing out all at once. The beggar by Oliver Bonas, the tenements with their old cars, they are not just pretty frames; they are a gut-punch about inequality and change. I would sit in my hotel, watching fireworks or cranes, thinking how it mirrored Scotland’s own high streets yet felt like another planet. This book gets that, identity, belonging, the cost of progress, and it is why it is lodged in my head.

Photography’s power is front and centre here. Calise does not just snap London’s shift; he makes you feel its weight, social, economic, personal. As someone who is chasing textures and contrasts with my camera, I am smitten with how he uses light to tell stories. The essays add meat to the bones, stats, voices, ideas that make you rethink every shiny tower. It is a conversation between past and present, a challenge to see beyond the skyline. For me, it is a keeper, not just for its beauty, but for how it echoes my London stint and the questions I mull in my own work: what is lost when we build, and who is left behind?

Utopia Ending is a stunner, a visual and emotional kick that is as much about Aberdeen’s quiet grit as London’s loud chaos. It is essential for anyone into documentary photography, urban tales, or just figuring out what cities mean today. Calise’s got me looking at London’s sprawl and my own shots differently, wondering about the promises we make and break. It is a book that sticks, a testament to how a lens can capture, question, and connect, all in one go.

Check him and the publisher out at the book at the following places:-

• https://www.gianlucacalisestudio.com
• https://www.facebook.com/gianluca.calise.16
• https://www.instagram.com/giankali/
• https://www.thevelvetcell.com/
• https://www.instagram.com/thevelvetcell
• https://www.twitter.com/thevelvetcell
• https://www.facebook.com/thevelvetcell

Regards

Alex