Peckham had a mythical quality for me as a young child, the distant place not at the end of the rainbow, but of the No 37 bus route. When I finally was taken there it lived up to its promise, the gloomily industrial end of the Surrey canal at Canal Head, bustling crowds in its cosmopolitan high street, and at the large green expanse of Peckham Rye. Although I never heard a bus conductor shouting “Garden of Eden!” as the bus reached what was then a common rendezvous for courting couples and would have been too young to have understood his meaning.
Over twenty years later, returning in the 1980s, both Peckham and I had changed a little. There was no water in the canal for a start, and although the high street was still cosmopolitan, the cosmos had shifted slilghtly. Peckham had also started to gain a reputation for something different, particularly in parts of the area, such as the 1965 North Peckham Estate. And I was a photographer.
Mostly what interested me at the time were the older buildings, the remains of a prosperous early and mid-Victorian suburb (many of the meaner houses had by then been replaced by even meaner council estates,) which I photographed in black and white, but the colour pictures were more concerned with Peckham and how we lived in the 1980s. These are scans from the en-prints made at the time, so are slightly and rather randomly cropped. The originals show a little of that special shift to brown of ageing Kodak prints, still visible in the scans despite my corrections.
Canal Head with settee, 1989 (C) Peter Marshall
Choumert Road, 1989 (C) Peter Marshall
Choumert Road, 1989 (C) Peter Marshall
Rye Lane 1990 (C) Peter Marshall
Since then I’ve been back to Peckham occasionally. Earlier in 2007 I accompanied the Human Rights Jukebox in June, and returned for the end of its showing and the ‘I Love Peckham‘ festival h in August. For that there were sofas on the street in Canal Head once again.
The last (I think) event of ‘I Love Peckham‘ was a show, ‘Peckham Rising’ at the Sassoon Gallery which I have written about in another piece on this blog.
Peter Marshall
