Gentrification is a familiar concept. The exponential rise of rents and house prices in the UK mean people have shifted – and almost everyone feels the effects. “Now even the 1% are being squeezed out,” Matthew Engel wrote in The Guardian in 2016. Nearly 10 years later things are even tougher, with food insecurity growing for many in our cities, due to stagnant wages and a fall in living standards not seen since records began in the 1950s.

Use of the Trussell Trust’s London food banks increased 37% from 2022 to 2023 alone. In 2020, two thirds of the charity’s food bank users were renters, while a quarter said their total household income wasn’t enough to cover their food costs. Born in Islington to artist and musician parents, I’ve witnessed these changes first hand, watching the place where I grew up evolve into somewhere buying a home and raising a family is out of the question for anyone but the extremely wealthy.

These images consider the challenges of urban food insecurity and the impact of gentrification. Together with food stylist Alice Ostan and prop stylist Alexander Breeze, I took to the streets of North London to compose diptychs examining the absurdity of the widening gap between the richest and least well-off in the capital, as well as the ways people are forced to innovate to put food on the table. Where possible, the food shown here was either reworked from previous shoots or out-of-date, to avoid waste.