Mira Okonkwo works alone in a converted dairy at the end of a farm track. From March to September she throws, trims and glazes, stacking pots on boards until the shelves bow. Then, twice a year, she loads the wood kiln and barely sleeps for three days.

If I knew exactly how a pot would turn out, I would have stopped making them years ago.

What comes out is never quite what went in. Ash settles on the shoulders of the jars and melts into a glaze nobody could plan. That uncertainty is the point, she says, and it is why her collectors are happy to wait.

The cyclorama is repainted every Monday morning, before anyone is allowed in. By Friday it carries the scuffs of forty shoots, from cookbooks to car parts, and the owners like it that way.

An empty white room is the most honest brief a photographer will ever get.

Bookings run by the half day, the coffee is free and the lights are set back to zero after every session, so nobody inherits somebody else’s idea.

The frame has been resprayed twice, the saddle replaced once and the wheels rebuilt more times than anyone has counted. The geometry, though, is exactly what the builder drew on a napkin twenty years ago.

Every part on it has been swapped except the part that matters.

He rides it to work, to the coast and once, memorably, across the Alps. Lighter bikes have come and gone in the shop window. This one keeps coming back for a service.

The sign on the door says open, and that is all it says. Regulars know the lights stay on until the last chair is empty, which on a wet Thursday can mean two in the morning.

People do not come here to buy books. They come to finish them.

The owner keeps a ledger of what each reader is halfway through, so the right copy is waiting on the shelf the next time they come in.

From street level the towers read as one dark wall. Look up, she says, and you start to see the arguments: who got the corner, who kept the light and who was told to step back.

A skyline is a planning meeting you can see from the train.

Her favourite is the smallest of the three, a slim block she was not allowed to make any taller, which turned out to be the only one with sun in the lobby.