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Meridian 2

Continuing with pictures from my walk along the Greenwich Meridian in Greater London in 1984-6.

Stratford Bus Station – Peter Marshall, 1995

My walks took me as close to the line of the Meridian I had pencilled on my 1983 1:25000 OS map as possible, though that line may not have been quite exact. I think it goes through the area at the extreme left of the picture above, here just a few yards east of the roadway. My series of walks kept as close as possible to the pencil line, but it often runs through private property, buildings, across rivers etc and many detours, some quite lengthy were required.

Barge carries contaminated earth from Poplar gasworks site, Peter Marshall, 2011

One of those fairly lengthy detours was north from Poplar, where the line ran through the gas works site and across Bow Creek. It wasn’t until 2011 that I was able to go onto the former gas works site, having been engaged to photograph the use of a barge to carry away the heavily contaminated soil from the site. The line crosses the river here, going through the left end of the large shed close to the opposite bank, near to Cody Dock. This is also part of a private business estate, though you can now walk along the roadways in it. There are several such areas I have been able to photograph in later years, but I won’t add any other later pictures to these posts.

Stratford Station – Peter Marshall, 1995

The line continues through the east end of Stratford Station.

Thinking of the line of the Meridian, I had decided it was appropriate to use a panoramic format, and these pictures were all taken with a swing lens panoramic camera. I think at the time I owned two such cameras, an expensive Japanese model and a cheap Russian one. The Russian was a little more temperamental and it was sometimes difficult to wind on the film, but had a much better viewfinder and I think was probably used for most of these. Both give negatives which are roughly the width of medium format film – 55-58mm – but only 24mm high, the limit of 35mm film, giving a roughly 2.3:1 aspect ratio. There is no discernible difference in image quality.

Langthorne Rd, Leyton – Peter Marshall, 1995

Both used 35mm film and curve it in the horizontal plane around a little over a third of the outside of a circle, with the lens pivoting roughly 130 degrees around the centre of that circle during the exposure. This keeps the distance between the centre of the lens and film constant, avoiding the distortion produced by using flat film, where the edges of the film are further from the lens node. This gives a very noticeable distortion with ultra-wide lenses, limiting them to an angle of view (horizontal) of roughly 100 degrees.

Swing lens cameras are limited in angle of view only by the mechanical limitations and can generally cover 130-140 degrees. But the curvature of the film does produce its own unique view. Assuming you keep the camera upright, straight vertical lines remain straight as the film is not curved vertically, but non-vertical lines show curvature, increasingly so as you move away from the centre of the film. You can see this clearly in the shop window in Langthorne Rd.

To be continued…

Meridian 1

One of the blogs about London I keep my eye on and occasionally read with interest is the rather oddly named ‘Diamond Geezer‘, who posts daily articles, usually about his walks or bus rides around some of London’s more obscure areas. As someone who spent around 20 years walking around many of these taking photographs, I often find these interesting even though I don’t share his preoccupation with some of the minutiae of Transport for London’s oddities.

The two most recent of his posts have been Prime Meridian 0° Day 1 and Day 2 and by the time you read this, there will probably be a Day 3. Since he is only walking along the line (or rather as close to it as you can) in Tower Hamlets and Newham there probably won’t need to be a Day 4.

Greenwich Observatory – Peter Marshall, 1985

I was particularly interested because I carried out a similar but rather longer project in 1994-96, completing it despite failing to get any of the Millenium funding which was on offer. I began at what seemed the obvious place, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich – as this was the Greenwich Meridian. My walk, carried out over several days, was rather longer, ending more or less at the Greater London boundary in Chingford – and later I extended it south from Greenwich to New Addington at the southern boundary.

Greenwich Riverside – Peter Marshall, 1985

It was rather harder then to actually trace the Meridian on the ground. There were rather fewer actual markers then and I think no published walks along it. Although my application failed, others were successful and obtained funding to put in new Meridian markers and publish walks at the time of the Millenium and yet more have been added since.

Back in 1994-6 I had to draw my own line on my maps – it was only in 1998 that the line was added to the Ordnance Survey maps – in order to allow people to celebrate the Millennium on it. Back then we had no mobile phones and no GPS – the first phone based GPS navigation system was only introduced by Benefon in 1999 and it was a few years before this became universal.

Greenway & Channelsea River, Stratford – Peter Marshall, 1995

I first published these images on the web in 1996, having then recently acquired a colour film scanner. It wasn’t a very good scanner and getting good results from colour negative film was tricky. I think I scanned most of them again later, but some could still be improved.

To be continued…

May and Mayfair 1987

The Fountains, Hyde Park, Westminster, 1987 87-5g-41-positive_2400

I’ve tried on several occasions to photograph the Italian Fountains in Kensington Gardens, an ornamental garden said to have been a gift from Prince Albert to Queen Victoria in around 1860, designed by James Pennethorne and incorporating ideas from their holiday home at Osborne House on The Isle of Wight. There are five main designs on the urns there, including the ram’s heads you see a few times in this picture, a swan’s breast, woman’s head, dolphin and oval. Taken in May when I think the trees in the background are at their best, some in leaf and others still showing their structure. The garden has been renovated since I made this picture.

Connaught Place, Bayswater, Westminster, 1987 87-5g-61-positive_2400

There seems to be a gate to the pavement of Connaught Place in Bayswater, probably to keep out the riff-raff like you and me, and I clearly chose to photograph through it as a frame to the formal architecture of the line of grand porches beyond. Although there are extremely expensive properties in a prestigious address, I find them rather dull, these heavy porches uneasy add-ons to the bland five-storey plain brick behind – which I chose not to include in my picture. But despite the porches, these are really the back doors of these building.

Bayswater Rd, Bayswater, Westminster, 1987 87-5g-63-positive_2400

The houses may have their doors in Connaught Place but the clearly face to Hyde Park, where the row has these magnificent balconies. I also photographed them in landscape format, but need to replace that image on Flickr as I find the negative moved at left to give a double image when I was making the digital camera ‘scan’, probably because the negative holder was not fully closed.

Shepherd Market in Mayfair describes itself as “a charming small square and piazza with a variety of boutique shops, restaurants and impressive Victorian pubs” and ” A hidden gem known for its wonderful relaxed village-like atmosphere.” It gets its name from Edward Shepherd who developed the area in 1735-46 on open ground where the annual May Fair had been held. Wikipedia comments “It was associated with upmarket prostitutes from its building up until at least the 1980s” and they were still in business when I made these pictures in the area. In 1987 it still retained something of the shabby charm from its really run-down times when it was popular with artists and writers 60 years earlier. The area is something of a maze of streets and alleys and I no longer recall exactly where this picture was taken.

Shepherd Market, Mayfair, Westminster, 1987 87-5i-35-positive_2400

You can still find Da Corradi’s Italian Restaurant and Ye Grapes in Shepherd Market though I think both have changed somewhat are there are now more tables in the narrow street.

Hertford St, Mayfair, Westminster, 1987 87-5h-64-positive_2400

Hertford St runs from Park Lane to Shepherd Market and then takes a turn north to Curzon St. This building is still there on the corner with Shepherd St and I think is a part of an expensive and exclusive private member’s club outside which I’ve recently photographed protests calling for kitchen staff to get a living wage and better conditions of service. The club is on five floors and includes a nightclub, four restaurants, four bars, a private dining room, cigar shop, a courtyard and a roof terrace and has a dress code which prohibits ‘sportswear of any kind’, t-shirts, shorts, sandals and dirty trainers. Personally having watched the kind of people who go into it I’m pleased not to be a member.

Hertford St, Mayfair, Westminster, 1987 87-5h-35-positive_2400

Towering above the western end of Hertford St is the ugly bulk of the London Hilton in Park Lane, the first Hilton to open in the UK in 1963. 331 Feet tall it overlooks Mayfair, Hyde Park and, more controversially at the time of building, Buckingham Palace and its gardens. The hotel is on 28 floors and has 453 rooms and according to Wikipedia is now the 84th equal tallest building in London, though around twenty still under construction will soon edge it out of the top 100, though I think it will remain one of the tallest in the West End – only Centre Point and the Millbank Tower are taller.

Mainly Marylebone

The Evangelical Library, Chiltern St, Marylebone, Westminster, 1987 87-5e-16-positive_2400

The Evangelical Library on Chiltern St in Marylebone was built as a school for the Portman Chapel in 1859 by Christopher Eales with minor alterations in 1880 and was Grade II listed in 1994 as “an early surviving example of a church school in a city centre an early surviving example of a church school in a city centre”.

The Library began as the Beddington Free Grace Library, housed at first in sheds and later a brick building in Beddington, before moving to South Kensinton in 1945 and then here in 1948. It grew to contain around 80,000 books and periodicals relating to Protestant and Reformed Evangelical Christianity including many rare and valuable Puritan texts. Over the years the Grade II listed building deteriorated and the the costs of renovation to prevent damage to the volumes led to the library moving out in 2010 to cheaper premises in Bounds Green.

Meacher, Higgins & Thomas, Chemists, Crawford St, Marylebone, Westminster, 1987 87-5e-43-positive_2400

You can still see this shopfront of Meacher, Higgins & Thomas, established in 1814 as chemists in Crawford St, Marylebone, and it has changed little from when I took this picture, though it has a larger illuminated sign at right and those large glass containers of coloured water which marked out every dispensing chemist in my youth disappeared from the upper windows a few years ago.

Marble Arch, Westminster, 1987 87-5f-25-positive_2400

It was a warm day in May and the closely cropped grass by the fountains at Marble Arch seemed a good place to have a rest. I think I probably sat on a bench or wall to eat my sandwiches and afterwards probably made my way down the steps to the public toilets and then under the subway into Hyde Park. Both now gone.

Hertford House, Manchester Square, Marylebone, 1987 87-5f-53-positive_2400

Hertford House, Manchester Square, Marylebone. Hertford House was originally called Manchester House, as it was built in 1776-88 for the 4th Duke of Manchester who apparently wanted to live here for the duck shooting. Presumably he had exterminated them all by 1791 when it briefly became the Spanish Embassy, and then in 1797 it became the home of the 2nd Marquess of Hertford who held many grand parties there, including a Ball celebrating the defeat of Napoleon. Despite this in 1836 it was let to the French as their embassy until 1851.

Hertford House, Manchester Square, Marylebone, 1987 87-5f-55-positive_2400

The 4th Marquess of Hertford preferred to live in Paris, but used the house to store his art treasures, and when the Commune took over Paris briefly in 1871, his illegitimate son Richard Wallace moved back into the house and renamed it Hertford House. He had the house extended in all directions to fit in all the stuff he brought back with him, and what we see now, including the portico, is largely the result of these modifications by architect Thomas Ambler. After his death in 1890 the house was converted into a public museum, The Wallace Collection.

I visited it many years ago and found it a rather depressing experience, but the interior has recently undergone a considerable refurbishment and the experience may well be less oppressive.

Hinde House, Hinde St, Marylebone, Westminster, 1987 87-5f-65-positive_2400

Hinde St runs west out of Manchester Square and the impressive church at the right of this picture is Hinde Street Methodist Church. The first church was built here in 1807-10 but this was largely or wholly demolished and a new Wesleyan church, designed by James Weir, opened in 1887. It remains one of London’s leading Methodist Churches.

Hinde House is a block of expensive leasehold flats, where a two bed flat might cost you a million or two.

Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, Duke St, Mayfair, Westminster, 1987 87-5g-11-positive_2400

Another place where I’ve often eaten my sandwich lunch in Central London is Brown Hart Gardens on Duke St in Mayfair. The extravagant building opposite this raised stone garden is the former Kings Weigh House Chapel by Alfred Waterhouse, built 1888-91 as a Congregational Church. It is a far cry from the more restrained and often classical church buildings I associate with this non-Conformist denomination. Congregational Churches in the past were staunchly independent, their life ruled by the decisions of the members, reached always by consensus, and I think most that I’ve been familiar with would be far too proud of their Puritan origins to have considered such a design. It seems to me very much more suited to its current use as London’s Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral.

Brown Hart Gardens, Mayfair, Westminster, 1987 87-5g-24-positive_2400

Brown Hart Gardens started life as a real garden between large blocks of working-class dwellings built by The Improved Industrial Dwellings Company in 1886-7, Balderton Buildings and Chesham Building. These were taken over by the Peabody Trust in the 1970s. On Chesham Building is a plaque to the first Duke of Westminster Hugh Lupus, recording that through these and other buildings he provided accommodation for “nearly 4000 persons of the working class’ and naming him “The Friend and Benefactor of His Poorer Brethren”.

The land was a part of the Grosvenor Estate, and the buildings were part of an extensive slum clearance programme in the area. The Duke of Westminster insisted on a garden being created between the two streets of flats, then called Brown St and Hart St, and this was created in 1991.

It didn’t last long. In 1902 the site became an electricity sub-station, and this was built with domed pavillions at each end and completed in 1905. The Duke of Westminster insisted that a paved ‘Italian Garden’ be provided for local residents to compensate for the loss of the former garden, and this remained open to the public until shortly after I took these pictures in May 1987. The London Electricity Board then closed the area. It was refurbished from 2007 on and reopened to the public in 2013, with a cafe around the pavilion at the west end.

You can see more pictures on Page 4 of 1987 London Photos

Silloth 2010

Ten years ago today – 22nd August 2010– I was standing on the Cumbrian coast at Silloth, my first visit to an area that I had previously known from the photographs of Raymond Moore (1920 – 1987) who had moved there in 1978 and spent the last years of his life there.

Ray was one of the first real photographers who looked seriously at my work – at a workshop at Paul Hill’s the Photographers’ Place in Bradbourne, Derbyshire, where I went to a series of three weekend workshops with him, and Paul Hill in 1977-8. He very much set me working in a far more disciplined way, investigating the areas which really interested and involved me rather than simply making pictures.

And of course I was highly impressed by his work and attitudes toward it. So much that there are a few pictures that I took in those years and a little after that are perhaps too clearly me trying to make a ‘Ray Moore’, though never really successfully. But over time I think I managed to integrate a little of his influence more successfully into my own work. I met him a few times in later years – and was able to send him some of my published work – but was shocked at his early death, and regret greatly that I never took up his invitation to visit him in Cumbria.

I wrote a piece about my experiences in those workshops for William Bishop’s Inscape magazine around 2000, under the title ‘Darbis Murmury‘ and ten years later put the text online with rather more pictures from them.

Raymond Moore was one of the first UK photographers to achieve wider cultural acclaim, with a major retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1981 – I think then the only photographer to be honoured in this way since Bill Brandt in 1970 (though that came there from MoMA in New York.) Since his death his work has largely disappeared from view (in part for legal reasons) and he had been forgotten. There are no dealers with his prints to push and maintain interest in his work. I gave a presentation on his work (and that of Tony Ray Jones) at Bielsko-Biala in 2005, but had to use the reproductions of his pictures without permission. My text there – which you can still download – ended:

The British photographic establishment seemed by the time of his death to regard him as an unfortunate and rather embarrassing episode that was best brushed under the carpet. Many photographers who knew him or have come across his work in the few slim volumes, myself included, still regard as a major figure in photography.
http://buildingsoflondon.co.uk/poland.zip

Ten years ago I was on holiday with friends, and the pictures that I took that day are more an illustration of that day out than a serious attempt at photography.

More Marylebone 1987

Marylebone Station, Marylebone, London, 1987 87-5d-36-positive_2400 — Marylebone Station

I suppose for many people Marylebone is the name of a station (though some will connect it more with its cricket club.) The station was the last London terminus to be built, opened in 1899 and never completed, with only four platforms of eight ever built. It lost most of its express services in 1960 and was only saved from closure and demolition by a thriving commuter service from Aylesbury. I think the train here must be one of those used on that route. Marylebone provided one of the few successes of the privatisation of British Rail, generally a triumph of dogma over sense, with the setting up in 1996 of Chiltern Railways. Among other services they provide a pleasant route to stations to Birmingham with comfortable trains and some very cheap tickets, part of the old ‘Great Central’ Network which could probably have been revived much more sensibly and at far lower cost than the ridiculous HS2 project.

Regents Canal, Lisson Grove, Westminister, 1987 87-4d-21-positive_2400

I had wrongly captioned this image earlier, thinking it showed the mouth of the Maida Hill tunnel, but although it was taken very close to there it is actually looking away from it, and the black hole at the end of the water is the bridge under Lisson Grove. The tunnel is hidden from my view here, some way down and a few yards to the right of where I was standing.

Entrance, Maida Hill Tunnel, Regent's Canal, Lisson Grove, Westminster, 1977 87-5c-41-positive_2400

I went down the steps leading to the canal towpath and took a picture of a boat entering the tunnel. The previous image shows the top of the structure crossing the canal over the mouth of the tunnel which carries electrical cables from the nearby Grove Road power station in St. John’s Wood which closed in 1969 – with the site now housing two major National Grid sub-stations.

There is no towpath in the 249m long tunnel, which is only wide enough for a single narrow boat; boats have to wait at the entrance until the tunnel is clear.

Regent's Canal, Lisson Grove, Westminster, 1977 87-5c-54-positive_2400

Here you see the canal under the cable bridge.

CEGB, Lodge Rd, St John's Wood, Westminster, 1987 87-5c-45-positive_2400

And this is the long wall of the power station site in Lodge Road. Although it looks very forbidding I’m told it was – at least in the old days – a very pleasant place to work. Coal used to come to the power station from a siding off the lines into Marylebone Station, though possibly at some time it also came by canal.

Volkswagen, Lodge Rd, St John's Wood, Westminster, 1987 87-5c-46-positive_2400

The Volkswagen workshops were opposite, and a little further west on the south side of the canal were the works of the confusingly named Thames Bank Iron Company, Iron Founders and Heating Engineers who made radiators and other heating equipment, and, according to their lorry parked in front of the building next to some pipes, Drainage Systems.

Thames Bank Iron Company, Lisson Grove, Westminster, 1977 87-5c-43-positive_2400

The pictures show a rather different side of Marylebone – and indeed London – than we now normally think of. They are a stone’s throw from the leafy streets of St John’s Wood with its billionaire oligarchs and from Lords Cricket Ground. But until a few years before I made these pictures, London was very much a manufacturing city. Things had been changing for some years, but it was Thatcher that really put the boot in, moving the country away from manufacturing and into services. And this de-industrialisation was one of the themes behind my pictures of a post-industrial London.

More pictures on page 4 of my 1987 London Photos.

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.

Portobello Rd 1987

Street Musicians, Portobello Rd, Notting Hill, Kensington & Chelsea, 1987 87-4c-13-positive_2400

I can’t now remember why I went to Notting Hill in April 1987 as it wasn’t quite on my plans for taking pictures at the time, and it was clearly only a fairly brief visit, walking up the Portobello Rd, usually the kind of tourist trap which I was then trying to avoid. It was perhaps the end of my walk with my son along the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union, leaving it at Great Western St and walking down to catch the tube from Notting Hill Gate.

Street Musician, Portobello Rd, Notting Hill, Kensington & Chelsea, 1987 87-4c-15-positive_2400

I wasn’t at the time very familiar with Notting Hill, at least outside various works of fiction such as Colin MacInnes’ ‘Absolute Beginners’ written in 1959 and including some graphic descriptions of the 1958 Notting Hill ‘riots’. a series of attacks by white youths, mainly “Teddy Boys”, on black residents of the area. A great book about an extremely cool teenage photographer which was made into a extremely poor film musical, which flopped despite a score by Gil Evans, title track by David Bowie (which reached No 2 in the charts) and contributions from other pop and jazz luminaries including Paul Weller, Ray Davies, Sade, Slim Gaillard and Smiley Culture.

Street Musician, Portobello Rd, Notting Hill, Kensington & Chelsea, 1987 87-4c-16-positive_2400

It may well have been the film and all the publicity around it which prompted me to walk on past Westbourne Grove station and down Portobello Rd to Notting Hill Gate. And it will certainly have been my interest in jazz which made me stop and listen and take pictures of a small combo playing on the street, deliberately choosing to work through the crowd.

Barrel Organ, Portobello Rd, Notting Hill, Kensington & Chelsea, 1987 87-4d-11-positive_2400

All of these pictures were I think taken on my Leica M2, which by then had a 35mm f1.4 Summilux almost permanently attached. It was a lens I had lusted over in the window of a secondhand shop in Camden for some time before handing over around a month’s salary. After that the 50mm collapsible f2.8 Elmar saw very little use; later I got a 90mm f2.8 too, but found that gave such a small viewfinder image it was almost unusable, except perhaps for a few distant landscapes.

Portobello Rd, Notting Hill, Kensington & Chelsea, 1987 87-4d-63-positive_2400

Portobello Rd, Notting Hill, Kensington & Chelsea, 1987 87-4d-65-positive_2400

Portobello Rd, Notting Hill, Kensington & Chelsea, 1987 87-4d-41-positive_2400

I didn’t take many pictures, but you can find a few more on page 4 of my 1987 London Photos.

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.

Paddington Arm 1987

Paddington Arm, Regents Canal, Westway, Paddington, Westminster, 1987 87-4a-23-positive_2400 — Paddington Arm, Regents Canal, Westway, Paddington, Westminster, 1987

You can just see the canal through the open hatch and across the galley area of the narrow-boat Crystal closest to the camera, but the view struck me as a remarkable interlocking of the boats, roads and buildings, different eras of construction and transport. The Westway here sits on top of the Harrow Road bridge over the canal, the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union which was opened in 1801. (Confusingly there is a separate Harrow Road bridge across the canal a hundred yards northwest and yet another a kilometre further on.) At right we have the concrete architecture built for the road operations of British Rail in 1968-9, around the same time as the Westway which opened in 1970. Its building made very clear the tremendous damage that building urban motorways caused to the city.

Footbridge, Lord Hill's Rd, Westbourne Green, Westminster, 1987 87-4b-12-positive_2400 — Footbridge, Lord Hill’s Rd, Westbourne Green, Westminster, 1987

There was just something zany about this view that appealed to me, with the smooth curve of the metal lamp support and the jagged line of the concrete bridge., and the two circular objects, lamp and mirror and that dagger of a church spire with its cross.

Regents Canal, Little Venice, Westminster, 1987 87-4b-23-positive_2400 — Regents Canal, Little Venice, Westminster, 1987

A rather more conventional view of the canal and a canal bridge, though I did deliberately include in the foreground those rails and slope leading to nowhere. This is the bridge at the west end of Little Venice, and takes Westbourne Terrace Road across to Blomfield Rd at the right of the picture. Google Maps names this place as the Little Venice ‘Ferry Terminal’.

Footbridge,Blomfield Rd, Maida Vale, Westminster, 1987 87-4b-26-positive_2400 — Footbridge,Blomfield Rd, Maida Vale, Westminster, 1987

The north end of the footbridge in a picture above, which linked Lord Hills Road and Blomfield Rd. Here I took a simpler approach to its concrete edge, making it a jagged diagonal, emphasized by the handrails. On one side of it the graffiti, to its right the regularity of the houses, probably dating from around 1850, in Blomfield Rd. The footbridge has since been replaced by a rather less interesting metal bridge.

The Blomfields came over with William the Conqueror in 1066, their name deriving from the village of Blonville-sur-Mer in Calvados, Normandy. There were many of them by the 19th century when this road was named, and among them several bishops, well-known architects etc. I suspect it was named after Charles James Blomfield (1786 – 1857) who was Bishop of London from 1828 until he resigned due to ill health in 1856.

Regents Canal, Blomfield Rd, Little Venice, Westminster, 1987 87-4b-43-positive_2400 — Regents Canal, Blomfield Rd, Little Venice, Westminster, 1987

Regents Canal, Blomfield Rd, Little Venice, Westminster, 1987 87-4b-44-positive_2400

This area next to the Westbourne Terrace Road bridge and opposite the Canal Offices used to be home to a strange collection of stone works, but these were removed and for some years this was just an empty patch of grass. It is now a ‘wildlife refuge’, not for big game like those here, but, thanks to Edward Wilson Primary School, is The Bug Hotel, Bloomfield Garden.

Regents Canal, Blomfield Rd, Little Venice, Westminster, 1987 87-4b-45-positive_2400 — Regents Canal, Blomfield Rd, Little Venice, Westminster, 1987

Westway, Regents Canal, Westbourne Grove, Westminster, 1987 87-4c-22-positive_2400 — Westway, Regents Canal, Westbourne Grove, Westminster, 1987

Finally my young assistant takes a rest (and a photograph) by the canal underneath the Westway.

All pictures were taken in April 1987 and are from my Flickr album 1987 London Photos which now contains over 700 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 no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, please share on social media.
And small donations via Paypal – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

April 1987 – Around Paddington

Junk Shop, Lisson Grove, Westminster, 1987 87-4b-62-positive_2400

Recycling is nothing new and we did a lot of it in the past, with many larger household items being re-sold in particular after house clearances in shops such as this. Of course it still goes on today, particularly in the poorer areas of large cities, but much more modern stuff is built to self-destruct after a relatively short lifetime. We now also have car-boot sales and charity shops that hardly existed back then, though we have more or less lost the jumble sales which used to be a big fund-raiser.

Broadley St Gardens, Ranston St, Lisson Grove, Westminster, 1987 87-4b-65-positive_2400 — Broadley St Gardens, Ranston St, Lisson Grove, Westminster, 1987

The formal qualities of this view amused me – the apparently pointless circular raised area in the foreground set against the resolutely rectangular and square repetitions of the housing in the top half of the image. And between the two a kind of transitional phase with the arched doors a rectangle with a curve emerging at the top. The fence along the side of the road seems to link the brick wall below with the row of buildings behind and gives a kind of spatial dissonance which interested me. In photography we are almost always dealing with the two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional space.

Henry & Farthing,Bell St, Lisson Grove, Westminster, 1987 87-4c-32-positive_2400 — Henry & Farthing,Bell St, Lisson Grove, Westminster, 1987

You can still find this cubic building should you walk along Bell Street in Lisson Grove, though Henry & Farthing Ltd are long gone, and their entrance at the right is now fenced off. It and the shop to its left are now one of several spaces in the area which make up the Lisson Gallery, a leading gallery specialising in British and Contemporary art.

According to Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History, Henry & Farthing were ” Manufacturers of: “Ternex” Brand Quality Precision Woodwork and Joinery; Reproduction Mantels and Panelling; Painted Small Piece Furniture; Table Woodware. Old Rooms Reconstructed. Precision Woodware Machine Turned and Fabricated. Joinery, Staircases, Built-in Fitments, Custom Built and Fixed.” The company is now dissolved., but there is a company Ternex Ltd still making similar products in Hertfordshire.

87-4d-23-positive_2400 — Orchardson St, Edgware Rd, Lisson Grove, Westminster, 1987

This view from Ochardson St across the Edgware Rd is dominated by the 20 storey Parsons House on the Hall Park Estate in Paddington Green. The 56m high tower which contains 120 flats was built in 1969 using a concrete panel system which provided poor insulation. In 1984 the windows were in danger of falling out and were replaced, and the outside clad with a non flammable Rockwool insulation behind powder coated aluminium panels. The bright red ‘fascinator’ on the top of the building is a maintenance cradle rail which was also added, along with other improvements. Fortunately Westminster used reputable architects for the refurbishment.

Rotunda, Harrow Road, Paddington, Westminster, 1987 87-4a-15-positive_2400 — Rotunda, Harrow Road, Paddington, Westminster, 1987

The Rotunda is still there next to the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union. Designed by Paul Hamilton it was built as a maintenance depot for British Rail’s road vehicles in 1968-9 and is Grade II listed. It was renovated around 20 years ago and opened as Nissan Design Europe in 2003.

Harrow Road, Paddington, Westminster, 1987 87-4a-14-2-positive_2400 — Exhibition, Harrow Road, Paddington, Westminster, 1987

And finally, a small mystery. Though the location of these images just off the Harrow Road close to the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union Canal and the Westway is clear, with the ‘Battleship Building’, like the Rotunda designed by Paul Hamilton for British Rail and built in 1968-9, inning the Concrete Award in 1969. Again like the Rotunda it became very dilapidated in the 1990s (raves didn’t help) and was refurbished in 2000.

But I can no longer remember what the ‘Exhibition’ was about, though I think as the text on the image suggests it was for one weekend only. It may have been connected with the Notting Hill Carnival, as the ‘Carnival Party’ was here, I think in 1986. I have a vague (but very vague) recollection of having been to something here, perhaps the exhibition advertised, but more likely in later years, mainly to look inside the building, but if so I don’t appear to have taken any pictures.

Exhibition, Harrow Road, Paddington, Westminster, 1987

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.

Against Facial Recognition

I’m not sure if you need this. But for some people in some countries it could be very important, assuming that it works. I’ve always been very open on-line, posting only under my real name and everything I post is public. I’ve been careful though only to post things that I don’t mind everyone knowing about me.

As a journalist I’ve had some advice and training on privacy issues, particularly on messaging and e-mail, but haven’t ever felt I was in a situation where I needed to put this into practice. But I do sometimes worry a little about my pictures on line and how these might be used to build up profiles of some of those present by legal or illegal groups, including the police who are already making use of facial recognition in various city environments.

There have been various attempts to block facial recognition, both through the courts and through various subterfuges, including the use of masks and special makeup. Covid-19 has surely added to the problems faced by Dynamic Neural Networks in recognising individuals and whereas wearing a mask was often a criminal offence now you may be fined for not doing so.

What is new about Fawkes (it gets its name from the ‘Anonymous’ mask) developed by a team of students at the SAND Lab at University of Chicago is that it is the first tool to enable us to “protect ourselves against unauthorized third parties building facial recognition models that recognize us wherever we may go” that “gives individuals the ability to limit how their own images can be used to track them”, able to defeat the tools used by systems such as https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dmkyq/heres-the-file-clearview-ai-has-been-keeping-on-me-and-probably-on-you-too clearview.ai using deep learning to identify individuals.

The team explain how Fawkes works (and for the technical there is a publication and source code available on the site)

At a high level, Fawkes takes your personal images and makes tiny, pixel-level changes that are invisible to the human eye, in a process we call image cloaking.

They go on to state that “if and when someone tries to use these photos to build a facial recognition model, “cloaked” images will teach the model an highly distorted version of what makes you look like you.”

I’ve downloaded the software (a small file available for Mac and PC) and run it on a picture or two. It was rather slow – but my first files were large. I tried it again on a couple of 600×400 pixel images to post here, and it took around 100s to convert the pair.

The differences are real but pretty subtle – easier to see if you right click to download the files then view them one after the other in your image viewer. The change between the two in each pair then gives me a slightly weird feeling

But these were both images of a single person and I thought I’d try it on something rather more complex but the same size. Although it said it would take about 1 minute, 5 minutes later I was still waiting, and waiting…. I went away and did something else and I think it took around 7-8 minutes. There were small differences to most of the larger faces in the image but many appeared completely unchanged.

The input files were all jpegs, but the output files are png, and have roughly five times the file size in bytes. They had also lost their various keywords and presumably other metadata. The files went back to a similar size to the originals when saved from Photoshop as jpg at an appropriate quality level, and it is these I’ve used here. Saving as jpg perhaps very slightly diminishes the differences.

I have of course no way of knowing whether the ‘cloaked’ files would – as the inventors say their trials show – provide at or near 100% protection “against state of the art facial recognition models from Microsoft Azure, Amazon Rekognition, and Face++”, but can only accept their assurances – and presumably their paper gives more details on their testing.

Fawkes is at the moment more a demonstration of concept rather than usable software, and you would have to be very concerned about your on-line privacy to treat pictures with it. But it does show that there are technical ways to fight back against the increasing abuse of personal data and its commercial exploitation by corporations.

Recently we’ve seen complaints being made by protesters about photographers putting their pictures online, with some arguing that their permission is needed or that they should be pixellated. While photographers rightly argue their right to photograph and publish public behaviour as a matter of freedom of speech – and the idea of claiming privacy seems to negate the whole idea of protest, I can see no objection to minor alterations in images which retain the essential image while frustrating AI-assisted data acquisition. It would I think be rather nice if Adobe could incorporate similar technology as an optional ‘privacy mode’.

Images used above are from My London Diary No War With Iran protest on 4th Jan 2020 opposite Downing St.

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.