Stunning aerial photographs

A nosey parker's dream: Stunning aerial photographs show what's going on in the world's back gardens

Little more than boxes on a hillside, these are our homes as seen from thousands of feet in the air. An aerial photographer has captured the different types of living arrangements people have all around the world. Jason Hawkes, from Oxfordshire, travelled above four continents by helicopter in a 12-year project to record how housing developments have produced abstract patterns on the landscape. From the picturesque circular layouts of suburban Britain, to thousands of identical apartments stacked on top of each other in densely populated Hong Kong, his pictures reveal an alien world that is at once familiar and unfamiliar. Mr Hawkes said: 'The photos were taken while I was on other shoots for an idea of covering peoples dwellings viewed from above. Homes in the UK tend to all be very low rise - typically just two stories and all with some kind of garden, big or small.  'But I just love the very abstract nature of the apartment blocks in Hong Kong. Certainly in some of the larger metropolises - where land is at a high premium - everybody has an apartment block.'But this is just as prominent in cities in the U.S. as the Far East. Among the countries Mr Hawkes visited were Spain, Norway, Hungary, Morocco, China and the U.S.