1997 I again photographed Notting Hill in colour, and I have yet to digitise any of the roughly 600 frames I took over the two days. I also have some more colour work from previous years I have yet to add to my Flickr album, and I will share some of those also at a later date.
En route to carnival, 1988 Peter Marshall
But in 1988 I was busy with both black and white and colour – and again there are very few of the colour images I have yet printed or digitised, including some more colour panoramic work. I have so far only scanned or digitised around 15 of the several hundreds of black and white pictures I took, some of which have appeared in the several publications and exhibitions of my carnival pictures, including the ‘The English Carnival‘ exhibition in 2008. I’ve uploaded these to the Flickr album, Notting Hill Carnival – the 1990s, but I think there are probably quite a few more pictures worth digitising when I find time
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 can offer little explanation for this rather sad looking bust, odd cup and plates which my contact sheet says I photographed in Dover St. I think the odd cup in the foreground is actually an extremely naff clock, with the lower snake’s head pointing to the hour and the upper head to a disk showing minutes. In the unlikely event it was working I took this picture at around 11.58. What it lacks is a rod coming out of the top with an arm holding a small bird or fly whizzing around for the seconds.
I guess the guy in the background could be Titus or Vespasian; most of the other Emperors had fancier hair, at least in their busts. This one looks around life-size and could well be the sculptor’s grandfather but more likely a copy of an older figure. From the number of similar busts around I have a picture of circles of student sculptors around a bust in a gallery at perhaps the V&A, each chipping away at a block of marble as an exam piece. Whoever did this one would have deserved a decent grade.
More sculptures with two young stone ladies pretending to hold up a porch in Berkeley St. It looks a rather boring job. But although both seem to be scratching their heads they don’t appear to be putting a great deal of effort into it.
Whenever I see this building it amazes me that this gaudy and extravagant edifice was built as a Congregational Church, the King’s Weighouse Church, built in 1889-91 to the designs of Alfred Waterhouse, better known for his Natural History Museum in South Kensington. Congregationalists are Puritans, tracing their heritage back to the Brownists and the London Underground Church of the 1560s. Rejecting the ecclesiastical trappings at the centre of the Anglican Church – cathedrals, bishops, vestments, formal liturgies, priests, the sign of the cross and more – they espoused a simple austere faith based on the priesthood of all believers.
Of course over the years there was some back-tracking. But most Congregational church buildings remained suitable austere, often with at least a hint of the Classical – and some did it very finely but without great ornament. Sadly their practices deteriorated to the extent of allowing church choirs, though these consisted of adult members who considered they could sing, and organs. But as someone raised in the tradition (though no longer involved) I still fine the ornate nature of this building surprising.
Perhaps it was becuase the King’s Weighouse came from an older – and Royal tradition, tracing its ancestry back to Queen Matilda’s ‘Free Chapel’ at the Tower of London, founded by her in 1148 and not subject to the rule of any bishop. When the 1662 Act of Uniformity made the Book of Common Prayer and other aspects of Anglican practice compulsory almost the entire congregation left and shortly after began to worship as an independent congregation in an ancient building on Cornhill where foreign goods coming into London were weighed – the King’s Weigh House. They kept the name when they built their own chapel where Monument station now is, and later in other buildings, bringing it to Mayfair where they combined with a congregation already on this site and then built a new church.
Perhaps it was the influence of this building which in the 1920s led the church, then led by Rev Dr W. E. Orchard to moving towards Rome and developing what became known as ‘Free Catholicism’. The church never really recovered from wartime requisition and bomb damage and closed in the 1950s. Since June 1968 it has been the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of he Holy Family of Exile, which seems a far more suitable use for the building. You can read more about it on the Cathedral web site, from which much of the above comes.
In Air Street we could almost be inside a cathedral. The rebuilding of the area around Piccadilly Circus was a subject of various proposals, plans and debates from around 1886 until 1928 which you can read in some detail in British History Online and possibly make more of than me. It involved many of the UK’s leading architects of the era, including Richard Norman Shaw and Sir Reginald Blomfield. I think that this section was built to Blomfield’s designs in 1923-8, but by that point in the text my eyes were fully glazed.
In Regent St I was faced with the problem of photographing something which I find rather bland and boring – like most of the more monumental architecture of that period.
I found another curve to go with the two of the street, but I think it is no longer there – and many other details of the shops etc have changed. Bus Stop C is still there, but no longer served by Routemasters.
Christ Church in Cosway street, Marylebone was no longer a church when I took this picture having been made redundant in 1978 and converted into offices. This Grade II* church was built in 1824-5 by Thomas Hardwick and his son Philip Hardwick, one of the more interesting of the many cut-price Commissioner’s Churches built from 1820-1850 to cope with the rapid expansion of the urban population.
Despite the appearance it is a largely brick building with stone dressing. It was altered in 1887 by Sir A W Blomfield but I think this did not affect the portico or tower, a rather unusual construction, “3-stage tower with square Ionic peristyle with cylindrical core rising into octagonal cupola with volutes.”
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.
Mayfair is one of my least favourite areas of London, and one where I often felt uncomfortable photographing. And one where I often had to point out to people that the law allows photography in public places including taking pictures of people and private property. But it was an area I felt I had to photograph, and where there is a great wealth of architecture and architectural detail. These pictures are just a few from page 4 of my album 1987 London Photos.
Many of these buildings will have been photographed many times before, but I think some have been overlooked, and what pictures are available don’t always show them well or in their setting.
As well as buildings, these are also pictures of cityscape, and arguably bad buildings have as much place as good ones in a record of the city. Since I took these pictures there have been changes, both in the city and also so far as images of it are concerned. Around the Millenium, volunteers from the Royal Photographic Society photographed most of our listed buildings for the National Building Record – with very mixed results, but more comprehensively we now can all view the streets though Google’s roving camera – of great use to me for finding the locations where I photographed. But useful though this is, it often does not include the exact view I want to see or which shows the subject best – and certainly never penetrates the alleys and off-street viewpoints of many of my pictures.
Excessive wealth seldom seems to come with a great sense of taste, as the shops of Mayfair (and some of its buildings) bear witness. And in one shop window I found a dummy that seemed to me to express the arrogance of wealth so clearly. Of course in some of the art dealers there were paintings and prints which I admired, and I did go into a few of the galleries to see more.
There is a long tradition of photographers taking self-portraits, and in one shop window I couldn’t resist giving myself a new head and making the square of the plinth below seeming to be in my hands as a large plate camera. It took a little guesswork to get it right, and ideally I should have been just a few inches closer so that my hair wasn’t visible as a small crescent above the head in the window., but I was surprised to get it as close as I did.
Nowadays a flip-down screen on the back of the camera would let me line this up without problems. Then I had to look through the viewfinder to try and get myself in the right position, then lower the camer and hope. You can see the reflection of my camera lens and camera in the middle of the plinth, and also the unintended tilt of the image as I failed to keep the camera completely level.
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.
For 1996 I was back to working with black and white, and it was a year which produced a few of my favourite images of Carnival. I’d looked at the results from the previous year and found the colour often distracting. It was the people that attracted me, not the colourful costumes.
I took around 800 black and white pictures over the two days of carnival in 1996, but cannot find a single colour image. Unlike for some of the earlier years I haven’t recently reviewed the whole set of pictures and there may be a few more to add when I do so.
You can see more of the pictures from 1996 (and other years) in my album Notting Hill Carnival in the 1990s. The pictures from 1996 start towards the bottom of page 2.
I’ll post some more from Notting Hill later in the year when I’ve added more pictures to this album.
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.
Notting Hill was in colour for me in 1995. Although I’d taken a few colour pictures in earlier years, this was the first year I decided to work entirely in colour – except for a few frames finishing a black and white film in one of my cameras.
I’ve never really gone back to look at the colour pictures I took in earlier years – something now on my ‘to do list’, as the black and white interested me rather more. But I think I had been encouraged to cover the event in colour by one of my potential clients – not an actual commission, but a suggestion that they might be more interested in colour, and I’d thought it would be interesting to try and see if I could do the kind of things I’d already done in black and white.
It wasn’t of course the first time I’d worked in colour. I’d taken colour pictures for as long as I’d been involved in photography, alongside black and white, but generally of rather different subjects. I’d switched from using colour transparency to colour negative film ten years before I took these pictures, but still hadn’t really worked out a good system for dealing with the work. At first I’d had everything trade processed and getting enprints. It’s a good system for the occasional film such as holiday snaps, but when you get thousands of them it becomes a little difficult to organise.
By 1985 I was developing my own colour films – along with the mainly chromogenic black and white films I was also using which could be developed in the same chemicals. Making contact sheets from colour negatives on colour paper was a little more difficult because I had to work in total darkness (or virtually so) and colour filters had to be used to expose them. The results were often not very useful, unlike those from black and white, and selecting images from them was rather hit and miss.
Last week I digitised every frame of all 18 films I took at carnival in 1985 – around 670 pictures – batch processing the results to give a roughly balanced image, discovering quite a few pictures I had previously overlooked. Around a third were worth further processing, and after eliminating some near duplicates and a further round of culling I was left with around 140 I felt were worth adding to the album Notting Hill Carnival – the 1990s. The colour work begins on page 3.
None are great pictures, though I think all have some interest. As a whole I felt they backed up my decision to work mainly in black and white in other years. But while some are similar to my black and white pictures, others do show another view of carnival.
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 had a good year at Carnival in 1994, taking some of the pictures of the event I like best, and I think rather more varied than some years, as these pictures show:
You can see more pictures from 1984 – and other years – in my Flickr album.
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’ve started, so I might as well finish. Here are a few of my pictures from Notting Hill Carnival in 1993, still in black and white. I did take a few in colour, probably using up a film already in the camera, but I’ve not really looked at them yet. Perhaps in a few days I’ll find time.
In the 1990s I was still working as a full-time teacher in a Sixth Form and Community College, and too often we seemed to start the term the Tuesday after carnival and I would go into work with ears still ringing part-deafened from the previous day. Carnival wasn’t just loud on the ears, the tarmac of the street vibrated with the beat, and so too did your internal organs, your whole body dancing to the music. It took me a few days to recover. Fortunately the first few days of term were mostly taken up with administration and not actual teaching.
It’s now around 20 years since I left full-time teaching to earn a living through writing and photography so even had I been able to go to carnival I wouldn’t be worried about going in to work today.
I seem to have taken rather fewer pictures than usual in 1993, or at least to have scanned rather fewer. I was in Notting Hill on both the Sunday and Monday and made almost 500 exposures, but there are only 17 in the album from that year. Looking at the contact sheets I think there are probably a few more worth adding when I have time.
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.
We can’t go to carnival this year so I’m posting some pictures from previous years – today from 1992.
I think all except one of these pictures were taken on Ladbroke Grove north of the station, the odd one out being the Kensington Food Centre a few yards away on the corner of Chesterton Rd and St Lawrence Terrace.
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.
We can’t go to carnival so I’m posting some pictures from previous years – today from 1991. These pictures are now on Flickr in an album of my black and white pictures from the event in 1990-2000.
Some of these pictures have already been widely published – and one has appeared this year in various publicity features about the Museum of London’s show opening this October, ‘Dub London: Bassline of a City’ such as ‘BOOM! There’s a new show about dub at the Museum of London‘ in Time Out.
I took a look back through all of the contact sheets – well over a hundred – in 2018 while I was putting together a set of images for a Café Royal book. Several of the new images I found made their way into ‘Notting Hill Carnival in the 1990s’ but many others are in the Flickr album. The book sold well, and is now only available from them in an archive set, Archive 4, a limited edition of 100 different books, costing around a thousand pounds. I still have a few copies of this and also ‘Pride Not Profit London 1993-2000’ and can supply direct to UK addresses for £8 each including postage – contact details here. Several other of my books are still available at Café Royal.
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.
Were we in normal times, today I would be thinking about going to Notting Hill tomorrow for the first of two days of Carnival. Much to my surprise I find it was eight years ago that I last went, having been on holiday away from London several years, and deciding the weather wasn’t really right some others. But perhaps I’m just getting old and was finding the music and the crowds too much some other times. At least this year I don’t have to make a decision.
The Notting Hill Carnival’s origins are in a ‘Caribbean Carnival’, an indoor event organised by Claudia Webb in 1959, the year after the Notting Hill race riots. The first procession was an impromptu one in 1966 from a neighbourhood street party, but it was in the mid-1970s that in began to be a major festival with a large attendance. But heavy-handed policing led to battles between mainly Caribbean youth and the police, luridly reported by newspapers and broadcast media which made many of us reluctant to attend the annual event.
August was in the 1980s was also a month when I was often in Paris and it was only in 1990 that I decided I had to go and photograph Carnival, and was both deafened and exhilarated by the energy and joy of the event. For the next twenty or so years – with a few exceptions when I was out of the country or crippled by injury – I photographed the event, at first mainly in black and white but later on colour film and then digital.
I’ve just spent a day putting my black and white pictures from the first ten years I attended, starting in 1990, onto Flickr. Some of them have been seen before in a number of group shows, including one in Notting Hill itself. I had a small one-person show at the Museum of London in the late 1990s, and put some on the web at Fixing Shadows, one of the first sites showcasing ‘straight photography’ on the web. This led to a 20 print portfolio with comments by George Mentore, published as ‘Notting Hill in Carnival’ in Visual Anthropology Review in 1999. I also showed the same number of prints in ‘English Carnivals‘ at the Shoreditch Gallery and Barbican Library in 2008, and later in the 2018 Café Royal volume, ‘Notting Hill Carnival in the 1990s’.
But for the Flickr album, which now contains 260 photographs, most of them published for the first time, I went back to the contact sheets. Most of those early years I went on both the Sunday – Children’s Day and the Bank Holiday Monday, probably averaging around 300 exposures on each. Probably a total of over 6000 images. But some of those were in colour, a few panoramic, so the 260 are from perhaps 4500 black and white frames. They include quite a few I wonder why I haven’t shown them before.
Technically they are quite varied, including some I’ve carefully balanced and retouched for publication and others that are untouched raw scans. Not every picture is critically sharp, as I was often working with no time to refocus and sometimes while in the middle of dancing crowds and concentrating on emotion rather than technique.
All the pictures in today’s post are from my first year at Carnival in 1990, when I think I was just beginning to get into the subject. More from 1991 and later to follow.
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.
