A Slice of London

What do the following have in common?

Crystal Palace
Peckham Rye
Bermondsey
Wapping
Whitechapel
Bethnal Green
Hackney

ANSWER

They all fall on the National Grid in the vertical column TQ34, and there are more pictures from all of them in the albums of colour enprints I put together from 1986 to 1992 as a project with the rather tentative title ‘Cross-section’. TQ34 is just one km wide and I have a row of A4 files covering around 20 such columns across the city, though those at the outer edges have fewer images.

The roughly A4 album pages could each hold four 6″ x 4″ enprints. I started by gluing the prints in place on scrap cartridge paper (unused from A level Art exams and cut down to size) but though that worked well it became tedious, and I moved on to purpose-designed plastic filing sheets, at first transparent and later black.

I tried at first to keep all four prints on any page either landscape or portrait format and from the same kilometre grid square, but as you will see on Flickr there are a few exceptions. The album TQ34 includes just over 70 pages and is shown on Flickr as in the album with most images having four prints.

These enprints were all trade processed and I sent the films off to various cheap consumer labs. The different colour casts they produced for each roll of 35mm film I felt added to the project, and I accepted some packets of pictures where I really should have demanded a reprint. A few of the worst I have done a little colour correction before posting online.

I finished – or rather abandoned – this project around 1992 when I installed a print processing line in my own darkroom and going over to bulk loading and home processing of my colour negative film. Producing enprints was too slow and fiddly, but I was able to make larger prints, and a small selection of these images where exhibited and sold over the years.

We are all stuck inside but you can take a virtual walk through London with me on Flickr.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.