MEDIA

​Alamy Image collection reference: OL15213399 | 7 photographs | Editorial use
This editorial image set documents the common cornflower (Centaurea cyanus) in natural meadow and field-edge conditions. Across seven photographs, the collection offers a consistent yet varied visual treatment, combining close botanical detail with broader environmental context.

Large crowds gathered at Matching Green in Essex on Boxing Day for the annual meet of the Puckeridge and Essex Hunt, a traditional fixture of the rural festive calendar.
Around 86 riders on horseback assembled with a pack of hounds on the village green, watched by an estimated 500 spectators who lined surrounding roads and open areas. Members of the public photographed the riders and hounds as they gathered before moving off.
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The Boxing Day meet is one of the busiest dates in the hunting calendar and regularly attracts significant public interest, with many attending for the spectacle and seasonal atmosphere. Families, residents and visitors were among those present at Matching Green.
Riders wore traditional hunt dress as hounds were brought together under the supervision of hunt staff. The event took place without a reported incident and formed part of a series of Boxing Day hunt meets held across England.

​It hangs there like a hallucination varnished in syrup, the great brick monolith of time, looming over the Thames like a guilt-ridden monarch that can't remember what it did last Thursday. The Houses of Parliament, all spires and self-importance, rear up in silhouette, jagged as the teeth of some long-dead leviathan bleached by the weight of its own myth. The sky is a battlefield of colour, clashing golds and bruised lilacs smeared across a canvas that's either dawn or dusk, it doesn't matter, really. Time is a drunken concept here, sloshing around inside that smug-faced tower that watches the city like a senile god with a wristwatch fetish.

​They stood shoulder to shoulder like bricks in a wall that was never finished, born from soot and silence, their eyes fixed on some distant joke only the grave understood. Four figures, not quite boys and not quite girls, not yet ghosts but already abandoned by time, caught in the amber of an unkind morning. A morning that smelled like coal dust and moral failure. The backdrop: an empire's ribs, cracked tenements and smoky horizons, where the sun had forgotten to shine and the milk always soured early. These were the progeny of an age with no exits. Ragged collars, hats pulled low like cheap disguises against the cold gaze of poverty, and faces carved not with age but with resignation, like someone had tried to sculpt hope and quit halfway.

Bathed in an amber glow reminiscent of twilight dreams, Golden Reverie captures the quiet power and elegance of a woman lost in thought amidst the geometric pulse of a burgeoning metropolis. Her flapper-style headdress, adorned with pearls, feathers, and a delicate bloom, speaks to a bygone era of jazz, ambition, and rebellion cloaked in refinement. The cityscape behind her, structured and imposing, contrasts with the softness of her expression, suggesting an inner world rich with memory,

By Martin Foskett / Media / News

It was Valentine's Day, but there was no love in the air in Takeley. No chocolates, no roses, just a quiet, frosty February morning laced with the low simmer of suburban rage. I'd wandered out with the camera, expecting nothing more dramatic than a few sleepy lanes and maybe a sunrise over the hedgerows. Instead, I stumbled into a domestic Cold War fought entirely with parked cars.

It wasn't an assignment. Not a quest. Not even an idea at the time.
It was just one of those days you end up in London, the weather draped in that miserable grey March shawl, and you've got your camera because, well, why wouldn't you?