lion | >Re-PHOTO

The Great West Road and a Missing Lion – Brentford 1990

The Great West Road and a Missing Lion – Brentford: Continuing my walk on Sunday 7th January 1990 – the previous post was Chiswick Cottage and Lionel Road Brentford – 1990.

*Vantage London, Great West Rd, M4, Brentford, Hounslow, 1990, 90-1f-45*

Built around 1970 as the 12 storey headquarters of Beecham Pharmaceuticals it was no longer needed after they became part of Glaxo Smith Kline and was refurbished as as Vantage London with offices let to a number of companies. The building was again refurbished in 2016 and in 2019 was sold to a Luxembourg based company for £30 million.

In 2024 a planning application was made by Resolution Property for its conversion into 178 flats. It was approved following some modifications in April 2025.

The elevated section of the M4 runs on top of the Great West Road in front of the building. The strucvture in the foreground is I think a gritting bin.

*Great West Rd, M4, Brentford, Hounslow, 1990, 90-1f-35*

Taken under the elevated M4 where slip roads link the A4 Great West Road with the motorway. One project I was working on at the time was inspired by J G Ballard’s 1973 novel ‘Crash’, key scenes of which were set in this area – although the 1996 film of the book by Cronenberg was made in Canada. Ballard who lived not far away in Shepperton obviously knew the area well.

Crash centres around a car crash victim who finds himself aroused by car accidents but my project was more simply about the domination of our culture by the car and I felt threatened by the powerfully enclosed architecture here which is perhaps a modern equivalent of the Roman coliseums, and was rather choked by the fumes.

*Beechams, Clayponds Lane, Brentford, Hounslow, 1990, 90-1f-21*

On previous occasions I had photographed the iconic moderne 1930s buildings along the Great West Road, and this at right shows Beechams, which had this side entrance a few yards down Clayponds Lane. The factory building continues in a more utilitarian fashion but with a tall window, probably lighting a staircase which reflects the style.

*Flats, Carville Hall, Carville Hall Park, Brentford, Hounslow, 1990,90-1f-22*

The Carville Hall Estate was bought by Middlesex County Council in 1919 for the construction of the Great West Rd, and they sold the parts on both sides of the new road to Brentford UDC as a park, which opened in 1923. The house, orginally known as Clayponds, is now called Simmonds House. Originally built in the late 18th century, the front was re-modelled in the 19th century. It is locally listed.

The park is off Clayponds Lane and parts of it were once dug for clay, leaving ponds, marked as ‘Fishponds’ on the 1871 OS Map.

*Lion, flats, Carville Hall Park, Brentford, Hounslow, 1990, 90-1f-23*

Beyond the lion and the park are the tall blocks of the Brentford Towers Estate built for Hounslow Council in 1968-72.

The house here had extensive grounds and there is now a park on both sides of the A4/M4. The park to the north of the roads is larger than this but of little interest.

The house is thought to have been built for the “wealthy distiller and brewer David Roberts (c1733-97)” and was later home to “coal and horse racing magnate William Lancalot Redhead (c1853-1909) and his daughter“. It was later converted into flats.

*Lion, Carville Hall, Carville Hall Park, Brentford, Hounslow, 1990, 90-1f-24*

The fate of the lion appears to be a mystery. I was surprised on a later visit to find it no longer there and I’ve not been able to find what happened to it. The most I’ve come across is a suggestion that it was stolen.

I thought that it was probably a Victorian garden ornament made from artificial stone – Coade or Portland Stone etc – and would have been fairly heavy, so the thief would have needed a lorry with appropriate lifting gear.

Church of the Good Shepherd, Synagogue & Stamford Hill – 1989

Church of the Good Shepherd, Synagogue & Stamford Hill: Continuing my walk on Sunday 8th October which had begun at Seven Sisters Station from where I had walked south down the High Road. The previous post, South Tottenham & Stamford Hill had ended on Rookwood Road.

*Church of the Good Shepherd, Ancient Catholic Cathedral, Rookwood Rd, Castlewood Rd, Clapton, Hackney, 1989 89-10d-34*

This Grade II* listed church was built in 1892-5 for the Agapemonites, aka the Community of the Son of Man, a group founded by former Church of England minister Henry Prince who set up the Agapemone community whose name means ‘Abode of Love’.

Various scandals ensued when it emerged that this love was sometimes rather more than spiritual. Prince died in 1899 and John Smyth-Pigott became leader of the sect and his relations with numerous female followers caused greater scandal. In 1902 Smyth-Piggot declared the Second Coming had arrived and that he was Jesus Christ, the Son of Man.

An angry mob chased his carriage across Clapton Common and he retired to Somerset where he died in 1927.

*St Luke, Ox, St John, Eagle, Church of the Good Shepherd, Ancient Catholic Cathedral, Rookwood Rd, Clapton, Hackney, 1989 89-10d-36*

The church was built by Joseph Morris and Sons of Reading, the sculptures were by A G Walker and the church apparently has remarkable stained glass by Arts & Crafts artist Walter Crane. When the last Agapemonites died it became in 1956 the Ancient Catholic Cathedral Church of the Good Shepherd and in 2007 the Georgian Orthodox Cathedral Church of the Nativity of Our Lord.

*St Mathew, St Mark, lion, Church of the Good Shepherd, Ancient Catholic Cathedral, Rookwood Rd, Clapton, Hackney, 1989 89-10d-22*

Another picture of the sculptures on the church by A G Walker. The stained glass which I was unable to see was by Walter Crane. There is a lengthy description of the building in its Grade II* listing, first made when it was the Church Of The Ark Of The Covenant.

*New Bobov Synagogue, Egerton Rd, Clapton, Hackney, 1989 89-10d-24*

Built around 1914-15 in an Edwardian Baroque style the Grade II listed New Synagogue was bought in 1987 by the Babov Community Centre from the United Synagogue. The Bobov congregation (Beth Hemedrash Ohel Naphtoli) was founded in Poland but now has its headquarters in New York and is Strictly Orthodox Ashkenazi.

*Newsagent, Used Cars, Stamford Hill, Hackney, 1989 89-10d-11*

The Hill Candy & Tobacco Stores Ltd at 141 Stamford Hill was well covered with advertising for Camel, Marboro and others as well as sensational posters for the Evening Standard, ‘LONDON MURDER SPARKS ‘RIPPER’ FEAR. Tabloid journalists were probably the only people in London who were affected by this particular anxiety.

The shop is now an off-licence. The used car sales with its bunting at right is no longer but there is a parking area in front of the offices there now. The Turnpike House pub just visible in the distance on the corner with Ravensdale Road closed in 2021 and is now boarded up.

*Eshel Hotel, Stamford Hill, Hackney, 1989 89-10d-12*

Eshel is the Hebrew for Tamarisk. Genesis chapter 21 verse 33 states that Abraham planted one at Beersheba and prayed there to Yahweh in thanks for God’s covenant with him. That species of tamarisk is a slow growing desert tree and at some times in the year it secretes a sticky honeydew which some think was the manna which provided food for them in the wilderness.

I think this building is now offices for Orthodox Jewish organisations. The delicate wrought iron gates and railings with the menorahs in them were replaced a few years ago by rather more secure fencing.

My walk continued to Stoke Newington – another instalment shortly.

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Chinese New Year 2005

On Sunday 13th 2005, 17 years ago, London was celebrating the Chinese New Year of the Rooster which started the previous Wednesday – it was 4072.

Chinese New Year in Soho is something I’ve avoided in more recent years – as I wrote in 2005: “I used to enjoy the rather anarchic celebrations in Chinatown, but it’s now more of an ordeal, with far too many people coming in to watch and too much organisation.”

Trying to photograph in such crowded situations was a problem, and one I confronted in two main ways in 2005, something reflected in the two pictures above. At the top is a picture taken standing back some distance with a telephoto lens, while the lower picture is taken with a fisheye lens, both on a Nikon D70 DX camera.

Usually now when I use the a fisheye lens like this, I would convert the perspective to give straight verticals – as in the above image. But back in 2005 I didn’t have a good plug-in to do this conversion, and although it was possible with various programmes I was using for making panoramas it was a rather time-consuming process.

For this particular event I rather liked the fisheye effect, at least in some pictures. Although it does clearly misrepresent those faces close to the edges of the picture, for me it pulls the eye towards the centre of the picture and perhaps gives a greater impression of the crowding I was working in.

A small problem is that the image you see in the viewfinder is the fisheye one, and not that in the ‘de-fished’ version. But as you can see, the fisheye image which you see has the same horizontal limits at the centre of both the horizontal and vertical sides, with just a little of the image towards the four corners being lost. It’s still possible to frame accurately when working.

It’s not I think correct to call the effect of the fisheye lens ‘distortion’. It is simply a different way of recording the subject on a flat rectangle. Most fisheyes I’ve used (and I own four different examples, for DX and full-frame Nikon, for Fuji and for micro 4/3) seem actually to have rather less actual distortion than my ultra-wide rectilinear (i.e. ‘normal’) lenses.

In the de-fished image you can see that as well as the verticals of the building being straight, people at the edges of the picture are also shown naturally, unlike in the fisheye version. I was also taking some pictures with an ultra-wide 12-24mm lens (equivalent to 18-36mm full-frame) and with that at its widest faces at the edge would have been rendered a little stretched out horizontally.

I’m not sure what some major agencies would make of conversions using software like this, whether they would regard it as an unacceptable alteration of the image. For me its just one of many acceptable corrections of the image, but clearly it does alter the image as recorded by the camera. It would be possible to design a specialised wide-angle camera which carried out the correction in firmware but the market for this would probably be small. Rather it could be provided into normal digital cameras as an option – far more useful than all those special effects which clutter the menus on many cameras now.

More pictures on My London Diary – scroll down a little from the top of the page.

Signs and Animals

Gosheron Tapes, Kensington Church St, Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea 87-10c-14-positive_2400 — Gosheron Tapes, Kensington Church St, Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea

I’m often surprised by people who look at some of my photographs and say to me “ I never notice that”, but I think it’s true of all of us that we walk around without really noticing things. Even buildings like Vicarage House, home of Gosheron Tapes, whose frontage screams out onto the street. But Gosheron’s days – at least at this address – had clearly passed, as an estate agent’s sign and flyposts on the windows clearly show, though they seem to have continued making packaging materials elsewhere until at least 2005.

The building now has antiques on the ground floor and serviced offices elsewhere, including the Nicaraguan Embassy. I’ve failed to find any information about its exact date – somewhere around 1900 – or the monogram which appears to be CS on its frontage. Information is welcome.

Godfrey's Model Bakery, Arlington Rd, Parkway, Camden, 1987 87-10b-66-positive_2400 — Godfrey’s Model Bakery, Arlington Rd, Parkway, Camden, 1987

The ‘Tasty Corner’ on Arlington St and Parkway in Camden is now an estate agentss and its large sign with its baker for Godfrey’s Model Bakery has disappeared.

Palmers, Pet Stores, Parkway, Camden, 1987 87-10b-55a-positive_2400 — Palmers Pet Stores, Parkway, Camden, 1987

Many passed Palmer’s Regent Pet Store on their way to and from London Zoo from Camden Town Station. It was established by Mrs Florence Palmer around 1918 but was run from 1924 by George Palmer, who built up the business and expanded into a second neighbouring shop in the late 1930s. Perhaps surprisingly this shop was listed Grade II in 2007, largely for its shop front which the listing text suggests dates from around 1940, though the houses containing the shop were built in the 1820s.

The shop, which had sold Winston Churchill his cat Orlando as a kitten which later moved into Downing St, and a couple of Abyssinian kittens to Charlie Chaplain, stopped selling animals around 2005 and moved across the road. After being empty for several years it became a tea room.

Clarence Cottage, Albany St, Regent's Park, Camden, 1987 87-10b-15-positive_2400 — Clarence Cottage, Albany St, Regent’s Park, Camden, 1987

On their way to the Zoo walkers might have walked down Albany St, or at least past its corner close to this hous, Clarence Cottage, which stii has its row of ornaments with a rather weather-beaten lion at its centre. Previously called Glenhaven, it isn’t clear to me why the mid-19th century house was Grade II listed in 1974, though it’s a pleasant enough building of its age, only really distinguished by this extension with a Ionic pedimented doorway onto the pavement outside and the ornaments above it – including that lion.

It’s in a area of London that has many fine buildings from that era and earlier – much of which is probably also listed.

Sussex St, Pimlico, Westminster, 1987 87-10a-42-positive_2400 — Sussex St, Pimlico, Westminster, 1987

I came across two dogs in Westminster, looking to me rather snooty. But I’d failed to note down their exact location and it took me a long time to hunt them down again – but they are still there in Sussex St.

Romany Hotel, Longmore St, Guildhouse St, Pimlico, Westminster, 1987 87-10a-62-positive_2400 — Romany Hotel, Longmore St, Guildhouse St, Pimlico, Westminster, 1987

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Romany Hotel is that it is still there as the Romany Hotel, though the signage has changed and now includes an e-mail address and a fairly discrete extra floor has been added on top.

But in keeping with today’s theme is the bird in flight at the top left corner. Although I’m no ornithologist at first glance it looked like some bird of prey, but I think it is really just a pigeon doing a good impression.

1987 London Photos

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