Islington shop fronts as Art

Every shop front has been designed by somebody to attract the attention of passing trade, from the biggest supermarkets to the most inconspicuous independents. It's those smaller shops that photographer Emily Webber is concerned with, and she's created a fascinating gallery featuring shop fronts from every borough in London. You can check out the Islington shop fronts that Emily has photographed here.

A born and bred Londoner now based in Hackney, Emily started taking photos of shop fronts in 2004, and the project has grown from there. Emily told me that she was drawn to take photos of shop fronts as a way of documenting the streets of London and the places she knew:

"The more photos I have taken the more I see them as stories of the people that inhabit them, the life of the spaces and the neighbourhoods that they are in", she told me: I find the lettering fascinating, the layering of uses and the choices of colours and fonts. "Islington has given me a lovely collection of fronts, which you can see here.

Interestingly, the very first picture to appear in the gallery is of Islington's Get Stuffed: definitely one of the borough's more memorable shop fronts and home to an ever-changing menagerie of dead animals! There are hundreds more images of commercial businesses from all over London on the site: some of which are interesting or funny in some way; others of which are simply remarkable in their ordinariness. The set will no doubt make an amazing historical record.