John Lynch pictured at Camden Lock

DOCUMENTING infinity – a task photographer Paul Scane tackles with relish each day. The photographer’s first book, London Unseen, contains nearly 200 images stretching back over decades of a city he knows intimately – and a city that, as his beautiful body of work illustrates, never stops evolving.

Drawing on the “extraordinary everyday”, he has charted the streets, buildings and people of the metropolis.

“My work explores the architecture and people that constitute London, taking in places famous and obscure, faces young and old, parades and deserted streets, the time worn and freshly contemporary,” he writes.

Paul, who is from Paddington, once earned a wage restoring Thames houseboats, and it was his river-bound lifestyle that first inspired him.

“Living on a houseboat on the Thames in the early 2000s, on early mornings I would wake to scenes of light and mist that were surreal and haunting,” he recalls.

All of Paul’s work is taken on a traditional film camera.

“The light, or mist, could be otherworldly, and it was then I decided to buy myself a classic camera,” he says. “I’ve always preferred older things rather than modern. I went for a Leica.”

His introduction into the world of street photography also came from working in the antique trade.

“I would buy French antiques from rural auctions and take them to Paris,” he says. “I started to collect secondhand books of photography in flea markets – the works of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Marc Roboud and others: a crash course in composition and a patchwork of photographic history. If you want to take photographs at a more serious level, then study photographers you like and understand why their images work. After all, they have been good enough to stand the test of time. It’s the same with all the arts – past artists leave us clues.”

Paul says he is “a full-time photographer in the sense that I always carry a Leica with me.”

It means his bicycle rides are full of unplanned stops.

“Readers will be able to hunt out hidden spots that appear,” he says. “As the natural landscape beneath shows through at the urban surface, so can the past: versions of the city that are gone or in the process of disappearing under layers of constant change. London Unseen is about these too.”

As development has changed and sanitised some areas, others are marked by clear decline.

“Many neighbourhoods once rich in eclectic character have rapidly had their rough edges eroded by incoming tides of new money and people,” he says. “These are processes we can no more hope to halt then we can expect to change the weather. We can mark them and in some cases mourn them. That is partly what London Unseen has become as it has taken shape: a memorial collage of life as I’ve been exploring with my cameras.”

Paul’s first camera came from Aperture Photographic in Museum Street, Bloomsbury.

“I started roaming and snapping,” he writes.

And then came the task of what to include.

“It wasn’t easy and I left lots of good images out,” he says. “I wanted to keep the locations as varied as possible. I wanted to show I had explored all over the city.”

By using four different types of camera and two types of film, he has created a varied collection. His subject matter is about spotting those quirks of communal living that are easy to pass by – and that we all do, every day – and recognising their power visually. His photos ranges from an ageing punk in Camden Town to architectural oddities, the abandoned, unloved, unwanted detritus left on our streets, the shops, homes and businesses that have been added to piecemeal and wonkily – or been left to slowly fade away.

He looks for “anything that visually catches my eye, it’s very instinctive.

“I can walk around London for three or four days with my Leica and not take a photo, then I’ll spot something. The theme has quite simply been anything London.”

And Paul’s superb book not only delights visually but asks the viewer to pause and be aware of the pace of constant change that surrounds us.

“Having a large body of work documented over a longer period of time, images can be more interesting when all seen together,” he adds.

“As I’ve got older, the change, especially in London, has been unbelievable. Much of what I have taken has since disappeared, so I’m glad to have captured them when I did. I’ve also had my disappointments when I’ve gone back to an area a week or so later and what I saw had gone, and some of those lost images still haunt me a little to this day. London, is a constantly changing city that never stop revealing to us something new. In a way, I feel like I’m trying to document infinity.”

• London Unseen. By Paul Scane, teNeues, www.teneues.com, £19.95