This photograph documents the Watts building, where I find myself drawn not by its undeniable beauty but by the profound confidence it represents: a certainty about the future that my generation never inherited. Through a lens, I explore the tension between Victorian permanence and contemporary temporality, using this architectural encounter to examine what it means to build for eternity in an age designed to disappear.

The stone spheres atop the entrance columns become my focal point, haunting me with their assumption of perpetual relevance. When I photograph them, I'm conscious of sipping a £5 flat white beneath the carved WATTS BROS name, feeling the irony pulse between past and present like a shared joke with no one laughing. My image attempts to capture this uncomfortable cohabitation between historical grandeur and transient commerce.

The arch performs something almost algorithmic on human attention, dragging it upward then inward through calculated visual manipulation. Yet this was designed when algorithms were mathematics rather than behavioural tools, when architects could deploy psychological effects without digital self-consciousness. My camera seeks to document this unselfconscious confidence: decorative capitals worn with the pride of men who never wondered if their choices would photograph well for social media.

Through careful composition, I examine the visual dialogue between permanence and impermanence. The carved WATTS BROS lettering reads clear against brick while the Nomad coffee shop sign glows beneath, creating uncomfortable shared quarters that speak to broader cultural shifts. The folding chairs outside appear to wait for architectural permission they'll never receive, temporary occupants of space designed for permanence.

My approach recognises that between carved details and weathered brick lies an entire manual of certainties never passed down to contemporary builders. Each shadow falls exactly where Victorian designers intended, teaching lessons in architectural depth to anyone willing to look up from their phones. These images become my attempt to document that educational relationship between historical design and contemporary distraction.

The broader cultural questions drive my visual investigation: the Watts brothers carved their name in stone assuming a future would exist to read it. Through this photograph, I consider whether this assumption makes them naive or renders us tragic, we who inscribe our names on platforms designed to vanish, who document everything yet build almost nothing lasting.

This work interrogates the relationship between architectural confidence and cultural anxiety. What does it mean to photograph buildings that embody certainty when we inhabit uncertainty? How do we document the weight of Victorian assumption against the lightness of digital existence?

The Watts building is both an architectural artifact and cultural mirror, reflecting back a contemporary relationship with permanence, legacy and the courage required to carve one's name in stone.