1986 was the year I began seriously to photograph the fabric of London, and the number of photographs on Flickr, 1,370 reflects this, although I took several times this number, mainly in a series of planned walks exploring different areas of the capital.
Caledonian Rd, Kings Cross, Islington
A few of those I’ve not digitised are near duplicates, though usually I only took a single image of each subject, often taking some time to consider the best viewpoint and sometimes waiting for people or traffic to leave me a clearer view. Although I was working on 35mm and almost always hand-held, my approach was generally like that of a photographer using a larger camera – and the 35mm Olympus shift lens gave me much of the flexibility of large-format camera movements.
Nat West Tower, Old Broad St, City
I had tried using 4×5″ cameras, a first with a monorail and then with an MPP, but found them too restrictive. Heavy to carry any distance, slow to set up and even with several magazines and a small pile of dark slides I was very limited in how many exposures I could make in a session. The movements on the MPP were also fairly limited, and the Olympus shift lens was more useful for this. While I admired the quality of large format results – and tried at times to emulate it by using Kodak Technical Pan – it wasn’t practical (or affordable) for the kind of large-scale project I had embarked on.
Venus, Canonbury Rd, Islington
Most of these walks in October 1986 were in Islington, where I walked around areas including Clerkenwell, Pentonville, Canonbury, Barnsbury, Highbury and Islington itself, though I think I occasionally strayed across the borough border into the City of London and Camden.
I travelled on public transport, using either the North London Line or the Underground, and it was sometimes easier (or cheaper) to travel to stations outside the borough – such as Bank (then still ‘City’), still a ‘London Terminus’ of British Rail Southern Region until 1994. I didn’t often use buses, partly because it was still rather harder than now to find out where they might go.
St Agnes Place, Kennington, Lambeth
There are also a few pictures from south of the river, around Walworth and Kennington, where we used to go to a monthly meeting with friends, arriving for Sunday lunch. I’d often leave early in the morning for a few hours of walking and photography before these meetings.
The pictures here are just a few of those I now find more interesting from the page, but there are many others worth seeing in the hundred that make up Page 12 of 1986 London Photographs.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
There are many pictures on the fourth and last page of my album TQ31 London Cross-Section I’d like to show you and say a little about, though in most cases they need little text, but it can sometimes add interest. But my time is limited and I’ll leave you to discover most of them for yourselves.
I think Andreas’s Barber Shop on the Hornsey Road had probably ceased trading by the time I took this picture, as there is no light bulb in the socket just to the left of the centre of the window. There is a notice in the door that gives its opening times, but where it says ‘Closed’ I think this may have been permanent.
As I was still working full-time, many of my pictures were made at the weekend, often like this one on Sunday mornings, when most shops would have been closed. The building is still there, but not the shop or its shopfront; the whole row of shops present when I was taking pictures has now been converted to residential use.
Rather to my surprise, this industrial/commercial building is still there on Drayton Park, and, at least until recently, the name ‘HOO HING LTD’ was still present above the doorway. The company still exists and is an importer of oriental food and catering products, but the site was reported as due to be cleared in 2006 for housing. However in 2019 it was still there; like many redevelopments it may have been halted by the financial crash.
Sisters Gowns was at the rear of a property at 216 Seven Sisters Road in Finsbury Park and this door was on Coleridge Rd. The property was demolished in 2008 (the sign had gone earlier), but the site was still empty in 2019.
Fonthill Rd in Finsbury Park, apparently known to locals as ‘The Font’ is possibly London’s best ‘fashion village’. On weekdays the trade is (or at least was) largely for the trade, but on Saturdays it becomes a busy retail fashion area, often packed with women on the lookout for a bargain. Fortunately most of the shops were closed when I went to take pictures on a Sunday morning.
A unisex hairdressers at Turnpike Lane excited me in my hunt for heads, with a couple of fine examples as well as some photographs. I think I took rather more pictures than the three you can see here. A recessed doorway meant I could work from several angles.
Close to Turnpike Lane, down West Green Road, I came across another interesting shop window for a tailor’s shop, offering best styles made to measure at local prices. Working with a single lens reflex camera with its through the lens view meant that I could clearly see how the reflection and direct view combined, and could make small movements and sometimes deliberate shading to control the effect.
TQ31 London Cross-Section includes almost 400 pictures made in a small sliver of London, just a kilometre wide, which reflect the different areas it passes through from Norwood in the south to Wood Green in the north. The pictures come from just one of around a dozen such albums containing colour pictures I took when working around London between 1986 and 1992.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
I found this head in a barber’s window on New Bridge St fascinating if rather revolting and made several pictures of it and a similar head in another of the shop’s windows. At £11.95 for Mens Shampoo Cut and Finish back then (£25 at today’s prices) this was an establishment catering for the relatively wealthy, though women may think it still a bargain compared with what they pay. The company which had a number of shops is still in business but not at this address.
Curiously this little area of central London remained largely as it had been left after the war when I photographed here in 1992. The Queen’s Head was left alone after bombing in 1940 destroyed its neighbours, the Blue Last pub, the Ventura Restaurant and a stamp dealer in Ludgate Broadway. Fifty two years later their empty spaces only in use for car parks. Although I’ve labelled it on the enprint as Ludgate Broadway, a sign on the boarding around the bomb site reads Blackfriars Lane, but the view continues down f Ludgate Broadway to Pilgrim St. The size of the tree in the bomb site gives some indication of how long this site has been empty, though I think the ground level was some way down on the other side of the fence. The red building in Pilgrim St is still there, the 1891 City Bank with a frontage on Ludgate Hill, and had recently been restored at the time of the picture. A year later Ludgate Court on its west side was renamed Pageantmaster Court. The ugly block to the left of the City Bank has since been replaced by an even uglier one, but both this and the Old Bailey are no longer visible from where I was standing after the bomb site was redeveloped, I think around 2000.
Apart from the colour which seemed appropriate for the trade, I was certainly attracted by the painted brickwork around the door and the signs, both for ‘B. W. Bellgrove (Meat) Limited – Wholesale. Retail & Catering Butcher’ which seemed unusually explicit, and also for the street name, Eagle Court, which made the location clear. Eagle Court is a short distance to the north of Smithfield Market, and runs between Britton St and St John’s Lane.
Designed by Berthold Lubetkin in 1938, the foundation stone was laid in 1946 and the scheme completed in 1949, the Spa Green Estate between Rosebery Avenue and St John St in Clerkenwell is perhaps the most complete realisation of the modernist approach to social housing and a power expression of the new welfare state. It’s special status, confirmed by Grade II* listing in 1998 has enabled the estate, which had begun to deteriorate as government policies turned against council housing and made it difficult for local authorities to properly maintain it, has enable the TMO now responsible to carry out internal refurbishments to modern standards (and in many ways the original was well ahead of its times) and to restore the exterior to reflect Lubetkin’s original vision.
Wigton House on Agdon St in Finsbury. The street used to be called Wood’s Close, but at the start of the 20th century was renamed Northampton St, and then in 1939 the Marquess of Northampton (whose Compton family were the local landowners) was asked to suggest a new name for it and suggested Agdon St after property his family owned in Warwickshire. Back in the middle of the eighteenth century people apparently used to gather here to travel with an armed escort into London because of the danger of being robbed.
This was the rear entrance to Wigton House, whose frontage was on St John St. It was built by John Laing & Son Ltd in 1936-8 as a speculative development and named after Wigton in Cumbria, the area where the company came from. The building was converted into flats shortly after I took this picture in 1992 and renamed Paramount House. The frontage on St John St was altered but this side remains clearly identifiable.
The album TQ31 London Cross-section contains many more pictures from the City and Finsbury as well as areas both to the south and north, all made in the 1km wide strip with Grid reference beginning TQ31, all made between 1986 and 1992.
A few pictures recently posted to my Flickr album TQ31 London Cross-section from colour pictures taken in 1979-85. These come from National Grid squares TQ3176 – TQ3181, part of the 1km wide south-north strip TQ31 through London.
Angell town got its name from the family who owned it in the 18th century, and in particular John Angell who died in 1550 and whose self-made will and various litigious claims due to his eccentricity and inflexible obstinacy resulted in years of legal argument after his death, and more after the death of John Angell, junior, in 1784. There were few houses on the land until it was fully developed in the 1850s by the redundantly named Benedict John Angell Angell, mainly with substantial semi-detached properties for middle-class families. St. John’s Church, Angell Town was consecrated in 1853.
Most of the estate around it was demolished and replaced by a council estate built by Lambeth Council in 1974-78. A combination of unfortunate design, typical of the time, and poor maintenance quickly led to the estate becoming a haven for drug dealers and other criminals. A comprehensive redevelopment in the mid-1990s led to some improvement but the estate later deteriorated, partly because of lack of support from Lambeth Council, and became the home turf of one of London’s most notorious teenage street gangs.
This café, the “IDEAL” was on the west side of London Road, north of the Elephant and Castle and just south of St George’s Circus. In the reflection you can just see a part of the Duke of Clarence pub, still there though now the Clarence Centre for Enterprise and Innovation of London South Bank University. The row of shops containing the café is still there but the shop fronts have changed and I can’t positively identify exactly which has replaced this.
When I put this project together, beginning around when I took this image in 1987, I was interested in the way that colour negative film and the cheap en-prints that were the normal way most of its users experienced it presented reality and distorted it. I liked the way images were often printed with strong colour casts and sometimes slightly out of focus, though this batch was one of the better in terms of print quality. Some processors also put little stickers on prints giving advice where they thought there were technical problems, one of which I’ve failed to remove entirely from this image at bottom left. I’m sorry I didn’t leave it on, as I can now only imagine what it said. I think either a warning about reflections or possibly against double-exposures – which of course this isn’t.
Joseph Cubitt who designed Blackfriars Bridge also designed the railway bridge which until a few years before I took this picture ran across the top of these piers, and had to make both bridges with the matching spans and piers, though those on the road bridge have a very different finish. His rail bridge for the London, Chatham and Dover Railway was opened in 1864 and the road bridge five years later.
The railway bridge to the east, on the left of the picture was opened some years later in 1886 and is still in use. But the station (originally called St Paul’s Station, but since 1937, Blackfriars) became less important when the Southern Railway was formed in 1924, with its main-line services being moved to Waterloo and the older bridge was no longer much used. In 1985 the superstructure was removed as it had become too weak to support modern trains, but these massive pillars were left, with some being used to support an extension of the station platforms across the Thames.
The Blackfriar is a remarkable example of a Victorian pub, Grade II* listed, on Queen Victoria St. Originally built in 1875 on the site of a medieval Dominican friary it was extensively remodelled in several stages beginning in 1903 in a jolly arts and crafts manner by Herbert Fuller-Clark, with sculptures by Nathaniel Hitch, Frederick Callcott, Henry Poole, and Farmer and Brindley. Their work was completed by 1925, but the large figure of a black monk over the corner door was only added a year or two before I took these pictures.
The pub was saved from demolition in the 1960s by a public campaign led by Sir John Betjeman.
The Wig and Pen club at 229 Strand was in a building from 1625, built on Roman ruins which claimed to have been the only building in the Strand to escape burning in the Great Fire of London in 1666.
Opposite the Royal Courts of Justice in its early years it was occupied by the Gatekeeper from Temple Bar, just along the street on whose spikes severed heads of traitors were displayed, and began to sell food and drink to the crowds who came to view them.
The club was formed as a meeting place for lawyers and journalists probably around the start of the twentieth century, and closed around ninety-five years later in 2003. Business dropped drastically as the newspapers moved out of Fleet St, but there were also changes in social behaviour making the lengthy and very liquid lunchtimes that were once the norm largely a thing of the past. It tried to keep going by making the lower floor restaurant open to the public, but even this failed to generate enough to keep the club going. Eventually after being vacant for several years it was sold by the landlords to a restaurant chain with the upper floor of this and the adjacent building being converted into a house.
The George Hotel, 213 Strand, was George’s Coffee House from up 1723 to the 1820s, becoming the George Hotel in the following decade. The building was on the site of an older building and was I think rebuilt in the Victorian era as a handsome stone-faced block on four floors with a balustrade across the front of the roof.
That building was ‘tarted up’ in 1930, with various additions to the woodwork of the ground floor, a half-timbered frontage and a pitched roof. I suspect that most of the antique internals also date from that facelift.
As a coffee house it claims many great historical writers as regulars, including Horace Walpole, Oliver Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson, and its basement is said to be haunted by a “Laughing Cavalier” or “Roundhead”, according to some accounts headless.
No-one seems to know why the additions to its frontage include an apparently naked man chasing half a dozen pigs or the monk with cat and barrel, though they are possibly copies from some older pub in what was something of a movement to recreate the old inns of England.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
There must be a reason for this van, parked at the junction of Rushcroft Rd and Vining St behind the large Foodstation building to have a horse on its cab roof, and I’d love someone to enlighten me. I think this is a classic Citroen H van, which were often adapted for use as catering or camping vans, and some are still in use and sell for high prices. There was even a special horse-box version.
The much-loved fishmonger in the railway arches, one of a number of businesses recently lost to the relentless gentrification of Brixton, despite a long and hard-fought campaign.
This sculpture and the mosaic panels were on Kemble House in Barrington Rd, and the pillar still has the mosaic, though the sculpture is long gone. I think both were added to the building in the mid-80s by Freeform Arts. The Loughborough estate was built by the LCC from 1954-70 to the designs of their architects department under Sir Leslie Martin, and provided 1,031 dwellings, including maisonettes in nine 11-storey blocks such as Kemble House. Since 1995 the estate has been run by the Loughbourough Estate Management Board.
An alley between shops on Coldharbour Lane still leads the Celestial Church of Christ at Loughborough Junction, and that strange post is still there in the middle of the pavement. The church “came into the world from heaven by DIVINE ORDER on the 29th of September 1947 in Porto Novo, Republic of Benin through the founder of the Church, the Late Reverend, Pastor, Prophet, Founder Samuel Bilehou Joseph Oshoffa. The Church is well known with Parishes, Dioceses all over the world with its International Headquarters in Nigeria.” More here.
I think this graffiti on Stockwell Avenue was on the side wall of 8 Bellefields Rd though it has long disappeared. A number of more official-looking murals had been painted in the area at the time, and one is still present on the facing wall, but this seemed to me to be more ‘Brixton’. The mural opposite was painted in 1987 by Sonia Martin of London Wall Public Art after consultations with local residents and was one of a series of Brixton murals painted after the 1981 Brixton riots with funding from Lambeth Council and the GLC.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
My pictures from TQ31, a 1km wide strip of London begin at Norwood Grove with a picture of the ‘White House’ there, a fine building dating from the early 19th century on the edge of Croydon. It’s a total mystery to me what I was doing there in 1991, but I did photograph this house again in 1996 but on a dull, overcast day. Possibly I was on a family walk and we had gone to look at its gardens which are listed with the house.
Hairdressers are a good example of businesses that can be set up with relatively little capital expenditure, and are often quite individual in the furnishing of their shops and window displays. I don’t think there are any real chains or franchises in the trade, either for barbers, unisex or ladies salons. And given the nature of the business the windows often include representations of heads – drawn and photographed (as in this case) or even three-dimensional, making them of great interest to me. Something that the differential fading of the colour image at the right only added to.
It was definitely the colour that attracted me to this cafe on the Dulwich Rd at Herne Hill, set off by the white porcelain ashtray. Getting the colour right in the darkroom (it wasn’t on the enprint) proved a little difficult, but the ashtray and the CocaCola box were good reference points and this was one of the pictures I exhibited in the 1990s
Brixton was a place I loved to visit for its colour and vibrancy. Back in the early days I went there quite frequently to buy cheap outdated photographic paper from A.W.Young Photographic in Altantic Rd. Later I used to go to Photofusion in Electric Lane to go to exhibition openings and take in pictures for their photo-library. This was Sherlock Electrical Repairs in Railton Rd, and they seemed to specialise in vacuum cleaners.
I bought some pamphlets and magazines from the 121 Centre in Railton Rd, on the corner of Chaucer Rd. It was a squatted anarchist social centre, and later in 1999 I went to at least one party in the street outside when it was threatened with eviction.
The centre had been squatted in 1973 by Olive Morris and became and anarchist social centre around the time of the 1981 Brixton riots, when Railton Rd was the “front line!, later gaining an international reputation for the groups and events it hosted. Set on fire by right-wing thugs in 1993, it recovered but was evicted by Lambeth Council in 1999 despite a determined and well-organised campaign of resistance. Property values in the area had risen dramatically and Lambeth who perhaps hadn’t been worried when Brixton property was almost worthless decided to take the property back.
More from Brixton in a later post. You can see these and other pictures in the Flickr album TQ31 London Cross-section. As I write there are still more pictures to add of TQ31 north of Stockwell.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
Page 10 of London 1986 begins in the city of London, and strongly features a remarkable set of figures around the Institute of Chartered Accountants building from 1890-93 in Great Swan Alley, off Moorgate a little to the north of the Bank of England. Above its first floor windows is a long frieze of figures representing various trades and figures, some dating from the 1890s and others added in the 1930s and 1960s when the building was extended. Among them you can see Wren holding a model of St Pauls Cathedral.
But apparently of more interest to me were what Pevsner describes as the “small very female termini caryatids” whose figures seemed very much at odds with my ideas both of the Victorians and of accountants and on whom I expended far to much film.
I managed to drag myself away from the sirens of the ICA and out of the City into Petticoat Lane and the area around this, finding as well as a market a large group of Christians armed with muscial instruments.
Later I returned to the City for more pictures, including some of one of my favourite modern buildings in the city, the Exhibition hall, Magistrates’ court and Offices by Richard Gilbert Scott at 65 Basinghall Street with its wonderful concrete roofs.
The city’s Highwalks also attracted my attention, part of a post-war vision of separating pedestrians from traffic by visionary architects who perhaps failed to appreciate the tremendous residue of street-level development that anchored people to the ground. It worked for areas that had been largely obliterated by bombing, particularly the Barbican, but could never become sufficiently comprehensive elsewhere across the city to make sense. It did however provide photographers with some useful elevated viewpoints.
At the end of the page are a few pictures from Bromley-by-Bow and Stratford back rivers, including some of the near derelict lock linking the City Mill River and St Thomas’s Creek with the tidal Waterworks River. I think this lock dated from the 1930s when the City Mill River was enlarged and other work done as a part of a flood relief plan for the area (and also to give work to the unemployed.) Because the Waterworks River was then tidal, the water level in it could be either above or below that in the City Mill river and there are two pairs of gates at this end of the lock. These were replaced by modern gates a few years ago, but a new lock was built at Three Mills as a part of the Olympic redevelopment, which probably makes the double gate redundant.
The Grid reference TQ30 continues north of Kings Cross and Pentonville up through Lower Holloway, Holloway and Upper Holloway and on to Hornsey, taking in a few areas to the side on its way. You can see my colour pictures from this strip of North London on page 4 of TQ30 London Cross-section.
I think it was largely the name which attracted me to the rather run-down premises of the Romeo Trading Co Ltd which gave no indication of what their business had entailed, and I could only speculate. Perhaps its name was connected with its address which was on Roman Way. The company still exists, though now in Edmonton and has a web site which includes the following text:
“Since its establishment in 1941, forming strong roots in military surplus, Romeo Trading Co Ltd has developed into a company with a manufacturing facility for all military and casual wear, together with its related products.”
Hornsey Rd had a number of interesting shops and provided some examples for various series of shops I was working on.
One of these was collecting heads, and this Hairdressers shop window had a couple of fine examples.
and there was another further north in Hornsey itself.
Fytos Fashion was another business that attracted me in part because of its name, which I read it as ‘Photos’ (but is really a Cypriot name.) But there was also the rather strangely bagged garments hanging in the window (no doubt to protect them from dust) and the large text below ‘WE SELL RETAIL BRIDALS, BRIDESMAIDS, CHRISTENING, HOLY COMMUNION’. Unfortunately you can no longer buy a bridesmaid here as this is now a nail care shop.
Another series I was taking was of cafés, and there was another fine example further north on Hornsey Rd.
And some really odd reflections in a shop offering shoe repairs.
These are just a few of the pictures on the page, which also includes a number of factory and workshop premises – mainly in a block now occupied by new flats, shopfronts and shop windows, houses, a view of north London rooftops, and ends with a distant view of Alexandra Palace and a less distant view of a gasholder.
Page 9 of my album London 1986, black and white pictures taken of the city that year, begins briefly on familiar ground in Southwark, close to the OXO tower, before going on to Clerkenwell and Finsbury. Because of my rather odd filing system the two areas interweave before I return to Southwark and Bermondsey.
A plaque above a hairdresser’s shop commemorates Guiseppe Mazzini, founder of Young Italy, a secret society formed to promote Italian unification. He lived in London at various times between 1840 and his death in 1872 to escape arrest on the continent.
I crossed Tower Bridge briefly and returned south of the river. The riverfront between Tower Bridge and Southwark Crown Court , opened in 1983, has changed completely since I took these pictures, though many of the pictures away from the river have altered relatively little – the George Inn was last rebuilt in after a fire in 1677.
Later I went to the City, wandering the area around Bank and towards the Tower with page 9 ending with a second picture of Pepys on Seething Lane.
The City is also an area where many older buildings have been preserved, despite some notable losses, though most date from the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, and most that I photographed are still recognisable. But the environment has been altered and many are now somewhat overwhelmed by gigantic towers.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
North of Covent Garden in the 1km wide strip of London in TQ30 we come into the areas of St Pancras in LB Camden (which includes Kings Cross) and Pentonville in Islington which were largely outside the tourist zone, apart from housing a number of hotels, none of which appear in my colour pictures from 1986-93.
Businesses here catered for London, and many were failing thanks to changes in technology and the de-industrialisation of our economy. A large swathe was blighted by plans for development of the railway lands, including much outside the actual rail areas that were threatened by demolition, though thanks to local opposition much has so far been saved.
North of Kings Cross there was to be wholesale demolition, and even listed buildings were not safe. The gasholders that were such a prominent landmark in the area were soon to be dismantled, with some being re-erected some distance away on the opposite side of the canal.
And the dancers on the side of Stanley Buildings were having their final dance before they and the other nearby buildings were demolished.
Perhaps surprisingly I took few pictures of the Regent’s Canal in colour, though rather more in black and white, but I had photographed around here fairly extensively in the previous few years and perhaps felt I had little more to say.
But it was good to have a picture of the road side of Charles Bartlett, Export Packers & Shippers, whose chimney and works dominate this stretch of the canal.
But the road that fascinated me most was the Caledonian Road and its side streets, as a number of the pictures here show. You can see these and others on the third page of my album TQ30 London Cross-section.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
