The LONDON Tiles is dedicated to all who love London, and in particular, to Heikki Kalervo Karvonen (Finland: 11 March 1921 - 25 July 1996). A gifted man, born soon after Finland's 1917 declaration of Independence, he found his vocation in life as a journalist. He was the devoted and life long partner of Lyyli Romu (maiden name Reini; she is also captured in the photo). As a young boy books were a scarce commodity, but this never diminished the love he had for them and later in life London's book shops would become a real sanctuary for him. Heikki loved London's art galleries and its sense for culture. He would photograph the many sculptures and monuments that he found in its streets and squares as if they were a special kind of document, preserving a memory that wanted to befriend his presence. He also loved London's newspapers, the coffee shops, the great museums, the concert halls and London's fabled street markets.
For Heikki, London personified character and charm at every turn: from the red double decker buses that busied themselves around Trafalgar Square's pigeons, to the swans and lakes of London's parks. But as a journalist, Fleet Street held a particular affection for him and it was here on the 26th April 1977 that he purchased what was then a first edition item from a "special map shop". It was a London street atlas in which he journaled " a rainy, sad day..." but this new book, out of all the books he could have chosen offered him real consolation. In this atlas he could find a link in the mind's eye to everything that London ever meant to him: the great, the good and the kindred idea that people are not lost and forgotten to time; but that somehow they could dwell on, remaining as if to nurture the future with a reality sufficient to comfort the human heart.
Heikki Kalervo Karvonen never did write his book on London that he so much wanted to write - as he verily feared the strain that such an exacting and immense undertaking could have on his health and eyesight. But perhaps the real legacy of his love of London was not destined so to be in such a book, but instead to be bound amid the memory of his Fleet Street atlas, that by chance, would one day find its way into the hands of his lifelong friend. If Heikki Kalervo Karvonen is to be rightly remembered, it would surely be true to do so through the things that Heikki himself had come to love. And so, with this in mind, that very same Fleet Street atlas was used in the creation of the The LONDON Tiles. If London could be likened to the spirit contained within an unsurpassed epic poem, one borne across the many reaches of time, then Heikki would be pleased to know he too is a part of this poem, not forgotten or lost to time, but one that is retold again and again. The 'Iliad' he loved so much lives on... and to borrow the motto from Shakespeare's Coat of Arms - "Non Sanz Droict" - "Not Without Right".