It’s hard to know where Paddington ends and Bayswater begins, or where Bayswater become Notting Hill. There are two Westminster borough wards called Bayswater and Lancaster Gate which I think most would consider Bayswater, and Notting Hill comes under Kensington & Chelsea, but popular perceptions usually don’t follow local government boundaries – and estate agents have remarkably elastic definitions of areas.
My walks by 1987 were generally planned in advance, obviously with a starting point from some Underground or Rail station, but also with an intended destination, and places that looked to be of interest from maps and books marked on an enlarged copies of A-Z pages. But the actual routes I took were subject to considerable deviation from plan, with decisions made at crossroads as to which direction looked more interesting – and I didn’t always end up at the planned destination. I kept notebooks to record my routes and some details of what I photographed, transferring the route to the map copies when I got home and some details to the contact sheets after I developed the films.
When putting the pictures on-line I have tried where possible to verify the locations from the pictures themselves. Some include street names and or house numbers, shop names. My contact sheets usually also have street names and grid references and web searches and Google Streetview or Bing Maps usually enable me to positively identify buildings which are still standing.
But where my pictures show only small details, it has sometimes proved impossible to be sure of the exact location, and this is often also the case in those areas which have undergone extensive redevelopment. But for areas such as Bayswater, where many of the properties have been listed and relatively little has changed it is generally possible to find exact locations.
During the 80s and 90s I sold several hundred pictures to the National Building Record, including of a number of buildings that were either already listed when I took their pictures or had been listed after I photographed them. I think there were just a few that I brought to their attention which had previously been unnoticed, mainly in the outer suburbs.
But my work in London came at a time when the worth of many buildings was being recognised both by me and those responsible for listings, which had previously largely concentrated on genuinely ancient structures and some public and ecclesiastical buildings, largely ignoring commercial buildings and those from late Victorian, Edwardian and more modern times. It was a prejudice even reflected in great works such as the many volumes of Pevsner’s The Buildings of England.
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.
