Over two decades Bob Mazzer captured life on the London Underground like no other photographer.

Immortalising a bygone era of Mods and Rockers, fist fights, youthful antics, smoking on the tube, and the everyday interactions of the 1970s and 1980s, Bob, who is now based in Hastings, took hundreds of pictures on his daily commute.

A few were published over the years, but it was not until a selection appeared on popular blog Spitalfields Life in July 2013 that things really took off.

Bob’s photographs proved to be an internet sensation, shared widely via social media, and subsequently appearing in the national and international press, including on the Italian Vogue blog.

“The internet seemed the perfect vehicle for it to happen at this time. Although they had been picked up in bits and pieces, they had never gone viral, and that happened because of the internet.”

Bob, now 65, was first properly introduced to photography when he was at school in Manor House, London.

“I took my first tube pictures after my art master decided to build a dark room in the art department.

“Someone handed me a camera, and said ‘go out and take some pictures; anything you want’. I went down on the underground, and came back with a picture of a couple of women nattering.

“When I was at school, I wanted to be an artist because I felt I had something I wanted to show the world, and that carried over into photography.

“I recorded my life as a form of diary; I photographed what was happening to me, and I do think the tube is fascinating – then and now.”

For a long while, Bob says, he did not think of it as a photography project, though several of the pictures were published in Amateur Photographer in 1969.

It was in the 1970s and 80s that he started to look at the collection as a whole and see potential.

The break came last year when an old friend, who had been trying to persuade Bob for years to do more with his photographs, put him in touch with prominent blogger The Gentle Author.

“I sent him a handful of photographs, and he sent me back an email with one word: ‘wow’,” explains Bob.

In June this year, a 200-page hardback book of the images was published, and a selection of 30 photographs exhibited at the Howard Griffin Gallery in Shoreditch.

“Those 30 pictures, every one of them was significant for me. If I had to choose one image that sums up a lot about what I was doing, it is the one of the busker, standing facing the wall,” says Bob.

“After he’d finished we spoke and he said he was facing the wall because it improves the amplification. A long time later a guy in a band [Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits] saw this picture and wrote Walk of Life.”

The photograph was used by the band on the sleeve of the single, released in 1985.

As well as being striking images in themselves, there is also the element of social history in Bob’s tube photographs.

“It’s a record of what people were wearing on the streets, not models but ordinary people. I had a leaning towards photographing younger people; I wanted to photograph my generation.”

With his small Leica M4 film camera in tow, Bob was often able to photograph his subjects discreetly, but in many cases the interaction between subject and photographer was key to the resulting image. Bob particularly enjoys this part of the process.

“That’s how you satisfy your guilt about taking people’s images – if you have to use subterfuge to take a picture, you don’t know whether the person would have agreed to you taking their photograph.”

Bob is still documenting the tube whenever he find himself in the capital, though he says his digital camera is more conspicuous than his old Leica, which presents certain challenges.

“The climate of suspicion and paranoia of people with cameras [nowadays] is difficult and distressing,” adds Bob.

Bob has previously had photographs exhibited at galleries including The Photographers Gallery and the Serpentine, but Underground was his first major solo show.

Both the exhibition and the book of the same title have attracted a huge amount of national and international attention, and Bob recently signed one for filmmaker Joel Coen.

Bob moved to Hastings 26 years ago, where he can regularly be seen capturing the town’s many colourful characters and events.

“I personally think the work I have done down here is equal to anything else I have done,” says Bob.