Born in Cornwall near Lands End in 1960 in an area called Ding Dong named after the local tin mine that once worked there and later having trained and worked in London as a commercial photographer in the 1980s Simon Cook returned to his hometown of Penzance in 1993. He soon gained recognition for his weekly Penwith Landscape feature in the Weekender pages of The Cornishman a local weekly newspaper which continued for over 10 years and resulted in a book Images of West Penwith