More From the Riverside: More pictures from my walk by the River Thames at Erith and Belvedere on Monday 1st August 1994 to its end in Plumstead.
My previous post from this walk, Thames Riverside – Erith 1994 ended as I approached the Erith Oil Works jetty. The path here climbs up to go over the roadway from the jetty into the works which provided some good views of the jetty,
Looking upstream from the bridge over the roadway from the jetty to Erith Oil Works – the tanks at left are part of the oil works site.
I continued along the path, looking back to take another view of the jetty
This whole shoreline was once lined by industrial sites with their own jetties, by 1994 mainly like this now derelict and shortened.
Looking inshore there will still industrial sites, but much no longer relying on the river, though there were still some like the aggregate works that still had working jetties.
Another disused jetty a short distance upstream from the Oil Works.
Sheds and neat stacks of orange and green boxes at a wharf – now serviced by road – at Mulberry Way. This gets its name from the temporary portable floating harbours some of which were constructed here in 1944 by Nuttall Brothers and towed to the French coast after D-Day to land supplies for the Allied invasion. Two temporary harbours were constructed on the Normandy coast; one only lasted a few days before being destroyed by a storm but that at Arromanches remained in use for 10 months.
A panoraamic view from the same viewpoint as the previous image. I had climbed up on the wide concrete flood defence wall here to make the picture. The sky was filled with clouds, perfect weather for panoramic landscapes.
I kept walking along the riverside path, coming to these timbers which would once have supported a long landing stage on a wharf with a short jetty into deep water. Across the river you can see Tilbury Docks at the left of the picture, with the blue hull of a ship there and some cranes, and further towards the centre the chimney and turbine hall of East Tilbury Power Station.
The horizon, dead centre in the picture is straight but as you move further down in the picture the curvature produced by the cylindrical perspective become more and more apparent. The path at left is straight and it remained straight to where I was standing to take the picture and beyond. Usually I tried to compose photographs so that this curvature was less apparent, but here I rather liked the effect.
I was working with two swing lens panoramic cameras (and two ‘normal’ SLR cameras.) Normal wide-angle lenses use rectilinear perspective become unusable with a horizontal angle of view of around 90 degrees as the distance from the centre of the lens to the film increases as light travels to the edges of the frame, increasing the size of image objects. The curved film plane in a swing lens camera keeps the lens centre to film distance constant so objects are recorded at the same scale across the image. Of course the wooden posts get smaller in the image the further away they are from the camera.
The curvature is much less apparent in this image taken a few minutes later and a few yards further upstream. But the shadow at bottom left as actually the shadow of the same straight flood wall as the larger shadow at the right.
Both of the panoramic cameras I had gave images with a horizontal angle of view of somewhere around 130 degrees.
I’ll post more pictures from this walk later. More pictures also in my Flickr album 1994 London colour – and you can see these images larger there by clicking on them in this post.
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