St John's Wood family photography

We've been exploring our neighbourhood and beyond shooting lots of doorstep portraits recently – sometimes in a sundress, sometimes in a raincoat, always happily lugging a long lens around our Northwest London stomping grounds. It’s making me far less lazy: we have three stations on our own doorstep, and ordinarily I would’ve hopped on the jubilee line from West Hampstead to St John’s Wood (they have a vertiginous wooden 1930s escalator, if you’re into that sort of thing). But nowadays I’m popping on my mask and strolling in the sunshine down some of London’s prettiest streets: I'm a forever fan of Fairhazel Gardens, and my new-found dream house is Alhambra Cottage on Boundary Road (Christopher's home town is Alhambra in LA County – we clearly need to live in Alhambra Cottage one day).

While shooting doorstep portraits, I keep meeting babies almost exactly the same age as ours – in normal times, I'd probably be running into their mothers on walks and at baby groups, or trying to squeeze our Bugaboos past each other's in cafés, clutching overpriced iced lattes. But instead I'm sequestering Nico at home and meeting his fellow teacup humans from a distance on their doorsteps and my iced lattes are now homemade, which is presumably very good for my bank balance and I should keep it up forever, pandemic or no (I will absolutely still go to Wired for a Love Cacao smoothie, though). One of those aforementioned babies was Kim's little daughter, smiling on their steps in the sunshine with their very friendly pup who tried really hard to be intimidating but was actually just a bundle of fluffy adorableness. Basically, this day was a delight and the walk was my favourite so far. Thank you, Kim!