Photography: Soho, By Anders Petersen

For the latest in his ongoing series of "City Diaries", the Swedish black-and-white photographer Anders Petersen spent a month living and working in London's Soho.

Appropriately for a district famous for peep shows, the resulting grainy and informal snatches of life – several of them glimpsed through window panes – would have a voyeuristic quality, were it not for the sympathy and sensitivity that typify his portraits of outcasts and outsiders.

As Petersen says here: "I wish to create a puzzle of life ... I want to see everything, capture everything, be a fly on the wall. But I am not a vacuum cleaner – I choose."

Soho includes a jumble of sex workers and street artists, residents and revellers, the mundane and the bizarre. All of the pictures were taken in 2011, but have a vintage quality, as if they capture moments out of time, or a region of anarchy, somehow resistant to modernisation or gentrification.