Don't Call Me Urban! The Time of Grime was originally published in 2010, ‘Don’t Call Me Urban!’ was a 12 year project that took as its prism the genre of grime, then the most significant and controversial musical expression to emerge from the UK since punk. Grime was essentially the UK’s own authentic response to hip hop, an angst-ridden, confrontational music conveying the hopes and frustrations of an apolitical generation locked into decaying housing estates. A combination of music portraiture, social documentary and architectural photography, the book was a visual reflection of what grime represented, chronicling the conditions that spawned the genre. The title was inspired by the rejection many black youths continue to feel at the ‘urban’ label imposed on them by commerce and the media, the book exploring the significant discrepancy between perceptions of black culture as ‘cool’ and the often harsh reality of being born black on a London council estate. The new edition of the book, which has been four years in the making, is almost twice the size of the original, reflecting a deep and thorough search through the archives and fresh perspectives that have emerged in the author’s mind with the passage of time and grime’s legacy.

Simon Wheatley emerged as a chronicler of London’s youth culture with the publication of ‘Don’t Call Me Urban! The Time of Grime’ in 2010. Hailed as a classic upon its release, the book was used as the visual template for the first series of the popular TV show ‘Top Boy’ and although primarily a work of social documentary photography, it soon became an iconic reference in the realm of street fashion. Clint419, the founder of the Corteiz label, acknowledges the book as the visual inspiration for his brand and contributes the foreword to the new 2025 edition. In a video collaboration with Leica for the relaunch of their M6 camera in 2022, Simon stated that for him photography does not really exist in the physical sphere, that it is always a reflection or projection of something else. His books, with their overriding sense of narrative, reveal that story-telling is his principle objective and his other publications are similarly socio-political in their essence: ’Lost Dreams’ was a more detailed off-shoot of his work with grime, which went specifically into the role East London youth clubs played in the emergence of the genre while highlighting their absence after over a decade of Tory austerity; ‘Silverlink’, while ostensibly a collection of pictures of a train line running across the north London suburbs was actually a reflection of the Blair years, honing in on New Labour’s failure to keep their promise to repeal rail privatisation, while ‘Always and Forever there’ focused on the French banlieue, portraying the institutionalised marginalisation of immigrant youth in a small town.