Around the age of nine or ten I enjoyed Saturday morning children's cinema at the art deco Odeon in Burnley. Squeezed between films of The Three Stooges and Flash Gordon I would watch another type of film showing high-spirited youngsters from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea exploring and constructing dens inside huge boarded up houses on Exhibition Road, making plans to regroup at the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens should anything go wrong. 
 
Thrilling stuff, I thought then - and it made an enduring impression on me. At that time Burnley had many empty industrial buildings with grim tall chimneys, and my friends and I made them our own for weeks on end, until discovered and chased away.
 
Down in London in the eighties, I continued to enjoy accessing abandoned sites with no security, climbing the upper most external ladder of the vast, monolithic Nine Elms Cold Store, to take in the views cross the city from its roof top. Just across the way, on an old bomb site, I squeeze under a loose piece of corrugated sheeting; inside, bursting with Buddleia and butterflies and leading down to the Thames foreshore was a private summer garden that later became the site of Terry Farrell's MI6 building.
 
Other places followed after I purchased - for £1- a skeleton key from the Squatters Network of Walworth, or SNOW, which allowed me access to any boarded-up Southwark Council property.

In 1984 I found myself at City Racing, an old bookmaker's by the Oval cricket ground, the interior felt suspended in time, suggesting that it had been abandoned in great haste. Names of racing venue and horses for that last day were written up in block marker on a large white board behind a counter still littered with biros and betting slips. Another room was half filled with neatly bound bundles of racing receipts as well as a number of unopened brown envelopes from HMRC that looked like they had been thrown dismissively into a corner. 
 
City Racing became a home and then a gallery for 10 years, hosting 50 exhibitions, and it is now the title of my new forthcoming show at Pace Gallery London.
 
Works in this new exhibition all relate to urbanism in some way accessing the hidden meanings within the familiar. The bronze relief series Brixton 14 December 1995 started the day after the riot of the 13th, or uprising as we now call them, has only just been realised as a finished work this year. Another series, this time of ceramics, came from spending a month alone in Shanghai in 2011, just observing the city at a distance but picking up on signage advising on how to live an exemplary life. Monument  a large-scale bronze relates directly to the fabric of the city in that it is a form seen everywhere, on thousands of buildings function being to keep the cooing pests -especially at mating times away.