This edition of cultural geographies in practice serves a dual purpose. It presents a photo-essay that depicts recent and ongoing ‘topographic’ research in London’s Borough Market, and it is an article about photography and topography as textual forms. The photo-essay examines London’s Borough Market through a series of assembled images that relates a narrative of Borough Market and demonstrates the inherent complexity of place. Through its unfolding, it seeks to variously question the ways in which text and pictures can be assembled into types of topographic (re)presentations. The article, presented as an essay, interrogates and simultaneously reclaims the practice of topography. It argues that topography is a methodological intervention into place and place-making as well as a critical spatial practice that can demonstrate place’s inherent complexity. The article further suggests that the implicit reflexivity of the essay-form through which photo-essays emerge allows for a critical spatial practice like topography to be undertaken.