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Almshouses, Museum, Hospital & Shops – Highgate 1989

Almshouses, Museum, Hospital & Shops – Highgate: More from my walk in Highgate on Sunday 19th November. You can read the previous part at Into Highgate Village.

*Wollaston and Pauncefort, Almshouses, Southwood Lane, Highgate, Haringey, 1989 89-11f-12*

The Wollaston and Pauncefort Almshouses were set up by wealthy City goldsmith Sir John Wollaston who was Lord Mayor of London in 1643 and a among many other positions was a Governor of Highgate School and briefly Lord of the manor of Hornsey. In his last years he had these almshouses built for “six men and women of honest life and conversation‘ from Hornsey and Highgate, and his will in 1658 made the governors of Highgate school trustees of the almshouse.

His endowment provided those living in the almshouses an income of 50 shillings a year and for money for the repair of the premises. The school governors selected the residents and laid down strict rules for them, including attending services in the school chapel.

However by 1722 the building was beyond repair and school governor and treasurer Edward Pauncefort had them rebuilt, doubling the number of residents to 12 and adding a charity school for girls. His endowment and other bequests also gave the residents a rise to £7 a year.

The Grade II listed almshouses were altered internally over the years and finally the year before I made this picture significantly modernised and provided with indoor bathrooms and toilets by merging pairs of the units, reducing the number of residents to the original six. Only one of each pair of doors is now in use.

My picture includes a phantom cyclist, blurred almost to extinction by the slow shutter speed I used.

Highgate School Museum, Southwood Lane, Highgate, Haringey, 1989 89-11f-13 — *Highgate School Library, Southwood Lane, Highgate, Haringey, 1989 89-11f-13*

The Highgate Tabernacle at 20a Southwood Lane was built as a Baptist chapel in 1836, replacing an earlier Presbyterian chapel and was Grade II listed in 1974. In 1976 the chapel was bought by Highgate School and served as their library for almost 30 years. It now houses the archive and museum of the school, open to researchers and occasionally to the public.

Among its holdings are the “Royal Charters of Queen Elizabeth I, authorising our founder Sir Roger Cholmeley to found a school at Highgate, 29 January 1565, 6 April 1565“.

*Southwood Hospital, 70, Southwood Lane, Highgate, Haringey, 1989 89-11g-53*

The Limes was built in 1815 and in 1921 was bought for use as an orphanage by the Furniture Trades’ Provident and Benevolent Institution who renamed it Radlett House. In 1940 they moved to larger premises and leased the property to Middlesex County Council who converted it to a small hospital. After becoming a part of the NHS it was renamed Southwood Hospital.

*Southwood Hospital, 70, Southwood Lane, Highgate, Haringey, 1989 89-11g-54*

The hospital was still in use though on a reduced scale when I made these two pictures, but a notice beside the main entrance (part visible on my first picture) makes clear it offered no casualty or accident and emergency services. It simply housed a few beds for chronically ill patients needing nursing care.

The hospital closed in 1991 and in 2004 was was converted into a terrace of large private houses.

*Shops, 164-198, Archway Rd, Highgate, Haringey, 1989 89-11g-45*

Archway Road was designed in 1808 as the world’s first bypass to provide a less steep route out of London than Highgate Hill for heavy waggons by building a 900ft long tunnel. Work started in 1810 but unfortunately the tunnel collapsed in 1812 when it was almost finished. Fortunately nobody was killed but it was decided to convert the tunnel into a cutting. This then needed a bridge to carry Hornsey Lane over the new road, and John Nash came up with an elegant brick design with a tall narrow arch for traffic and above that a three arch bridge carrying the road.

But the arch was too narrow as traffic increased and was replaced with the current bridge in 1900. This row of shops begin around 200 metres north of the bridge.

*Shops, 164-198, Archway Rd, Highgate, Haringey, 1989 89-11g-33*

Steps lead up from Archway Road to Winchester Road from where I was able to make this second picture of the long row of shops. The conservation area appraisal describes this as late Victorian and “very distinctive with original balustrades above many of the shops” and notes the “top floor balconies set back under large arches with half timbering” and the “very eye-catching” roofscape though it notes only some of the stone finials have survived. These details are clearer in the previous picture.

Still more from Highate to come in a later post.

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25 Years Ago – April 1999

25 Years Ago – April 1999. When I began posting on my web site My London Diary I decided that the posts would begin from the start of 1999, and there are still image files I created in January of that year on line, though I think they probably only went live on the web a few months later.

In those early days of the site there was very little writing on it (and relatively few pictures) with most pictures just posted with minimal captions if any.

A single text on the introductory page for the year 1999 explained my rather diffuse intentions for the site as follows (I’ve updated the layout and capitalisation.)

What is My London Diary? A record of my day to day wanderings in and around London, camera in hand and some of my comments which may be related to these – or not

Things I’ve found and perhaps things people tell me. If I really knew what this site was I wouldn’t bother to write it. It’s London, it’s part of my life, but mainly pictures, arranged day by day, ordered by month and year.
My London Diary 1999

In the years following My London Diary expanded considerably, gradually adding more text about the events I was covering but retaining the same basic structure. Had I begun it a few years later it would have used a blogging platform – such as WordPress on which this blog runs, but in 1999 blogging was still in its infancy and My London Diary was handcoded html – with help from Dreamweaver and more recently BlueGriffon, now sadly no longer.

My London Diary continued until Covid brought much of my new photography to a standstill and stuttered briefly back to life after we came out of purdah. But by then my priorities had changed, and although I am still taking some new photographs and covering rather more carefully selected events my emphasis has switched to bringing to light the many thousands of largely unseen pictures taken on film in my archives, particularly through posting on Flickr. Since March 2020 I’ve uploaded around 32,000 pictures and have had over 12 million views there, mainly of pictures I made between 1975 and 1994. The images are at higher resolution than those on my various web sites.

*121 Street Party, Railton Rd, Brixton. 10th April 1999 121 was a squatted self-managed anarchist social centre on Railton Road in Brixton from 1981 until 1999.*

Since I moved to digital photography My London Diary has put much of my work online, though more recent work goes into Facebook albums (and much onto Alamy.) My London Diary remains online as a low resolution archive of my work.

*Sikhs celebrate 300 Years of Khalsa – Southall. 11th April 1999*

April 1999 was an interesting month and all the pictures in this post come from it. I’ve added some brief captions to the pictures.

No War on Iraq protest – Hyde Park, 17 April 1999 President Bill Clinton was threatening to attack Iraq to destroy its capability to produce nuclear weapons. Operation Desert Fox, a four day air attack, came in December 1999

*Southall Remembers Blair Peach – Southall. 24th April 1999. Blair Peach, a teacher in East London was murdered by police while protesting a National Front meeting in Southall in 1979.*

*Stockley Park – one of a series of panoramic landscapes of developments in London – this is a major office park with some outstanding architecture*

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Joan Liftin (1933-2023)

I didn’t really know Joan Liftin who died recently well, but met her when I attended a workshop led by her husband, Charles Harbutt (1935-2015) at Duckspool in Somerset in the 1990s. I was impressed by some photographs she showed there and both she and Charlie were sympathetic and made helpful criticisms about my own work as well as expressing some views on photography which influenced me. Later she sent me a copy of her first book, ‘Drive-Ins‘ which I reviewed for the photography site I was then running for About.com, long defunct.

I heard about her death on The Eye of Photography, where you can read an obit by her friend, the photographer Brigitte Grignet, though unless you are a subscriber you will not be able to see more than a couple of her photographs. But you can see more on Liftin’s web site, which has a few pictures from each of her three books.

There is a lengthy podcast interview with her on ‘Right Eye Dominant‘ where she talks at length about her life and career at Magnum, ICP and more, working with almost every photographer whose name you will know. The sound is a little rough but her character which attracted me really comes across. Close to the end she talks a little about Harbutt and his work. You can also hear her talking on the B&H Photography Podcast. There is a written interview with her on Visura magazine, which in many ways I prefer to a podcast, though it was good to hear her voice again.

Harbutt played an important part in my own photography, particularly through his book ‘Travelog‘ published by MIT in 1973. This was one of the first photography books I bought and opened my eyes to different ways of working. His workshops were legendary, and it was one of those which inspired Peter Goldfield, who I met in the 1970s to leaving Muswell Hill where he had set up Goldfinger Photographic above his pharmacy in Muswell Hill and set up the photography workshop at Duckspool and I wrote about this at the time of Peter’s death in 2009.

Liftin’s web site also has links to a post in the NY Times archive, Moving Freely, and Photographing, in Marseille, with text by Rena Silverman and 16 photographs, though again access may be limited if you are not a subscriber. There are also links to some other features on her Marseille book on her site.

Liftin wrote an introduction to The Unconcerned Photographer published in 2020 which includes the text of a lecture given by Harbutt in 1970 which first publicly expressed his views on photography.