Late in the afternoon: Walter William Burgess

You have been here before. You have stood on this foreshore, seen those beached barges waiting for the next tide. You’ve walked those streets. But the last time you were looking through the eyes of the photographer, an artist who worked through light falling on a glass plate. This week you’re seeing the scenes below through the imagination of a man who worked with pencil and ink, and by scratching lines on a sheet of metal. Just as William Cowen created a rural idyll in the area between Kensington and Chelsea (Idle days in southern Kensington – see list of posts opposite) so Walter William Burgess created an urban fantasy out of what he saw in Chelsea in the second half of the 19^th century.

Here is Lindsey Wharf again, the barges with their sails furled and the men walking on the mud up to the stairs.

Back on solid ground this is Lindsey Row looking west echoing the view we saw in the Hedderly post Tales of the Riverbank.

The tide is in and there seems to be more activity in the street. To me it looks like an afternoon scene. Smoke from the chimneys and people on their way home. That same horse and cart waiting in the first picture are now on their way. The sky is full of clouds, birds are on the wing. The guys from Green’s boatyard have moved a tricky job out into the street.

Past the bridge in Cheyne Walk the high tide touches the road.

A milkmaid heads towards the Old Church. Two men with time on their hands relax and talk just feet from the water. This picture has the feel of an earlier period than the others, perhaps the 1830s or 1840s when Chelsea was still half rural full of market gardens and nurseries. Burgess has slipped us into a time machine of his own.

We’re moving away from the waterfront now. This is Justice Walk. The Wesleyan Chapel building is still there even that strange cage like structure over the basement yard. The building has also  a court house been a wine merchant’s house. The street may take its name from a resident of nearby Lawrence Street the famous magistrate and founder of the Bow Street Runners Sir John Fielding. A story persists that it has a tunnel in the cellar which leads to the river. Chelsea has quite a few of those rumoured hidden passages. Very few of them can be found today.

I used to walk through this alley every evening on the way home from work. it’s quiet, tranquil rather than spooky although I once saw two of the modern equivalents of the Runners in action there. I can’t say more than that here.

Now we’re looking south down Old Church Street. There are cafes, shops, houses. A woman I think I should recognize from a Hedderly photograph walks with her son. Some other children are playing with hoops. Hoops are a bit of a craze in Burgess pictures. It looks like another late afternoon. The hint of growing shadows, more smoke in the air.

Burgess’s Chelsea has secret places too behind the public streets.

The Moravian burial ground. If you remember this patch of green has been used in our century for exercising a lion. But it has obviously always welcomed animals. Who is the figure in black on the path?

I’m not good with botany but I know that’s a cedar tree looming over the Sloane statue. In our archive room there is a cedar box made from wood from this garden. A couple of potted plants sit in front of Sloane like some kind of offering. At the left another stone deity stands surrounded by plants.  From the Physic Garden you can move on to the Royal Hospital. In the picture below two Pensioners have left the Hospital to stroll up Franklin’s Row. It’s one of my favourite Burgess pictures.

It’s the sheep that make the picture for me. But go back and look through these pictures again. You’ll find animals in every one. Horses, chickens, dogs and cats. The goat. If he couldn’t insert four legged creatures Burgess made do with birds. He couldn’t keep the animals out. Perhaps it was part of urban life in those days. Even in the city we shared our space with them. Is there an unknown animal among the exotic plants in the Physic Garden? WWB might know for sure.

Walter William Burgess lived from 1845 to 1908. Very little is known about his life but given the time he was in Chelsea it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that he knew Hedderly, the Greaves brothers and maybe Whistler as well. Many of Burgess’s pictures are collected in a folio volume called Bits of Old Chelsea.

Empty streets: Brompton Road 1902

Photographers unlike painters or engravers often have no idea of the uses their creations may be put to once out of their hands. Vickie and Nance (see lists of posts opposite) had no idea that their holiday snaps would one day be spun into a kind of narrative by me. That applies to many of the others whose images you can see on this blog such as Kate Pragnell (Games for May) and possibly even James Hedderly (although I think he had a definite eye for posterity). This week’s photographer is another case of the unconscious artist.

The photographs were all taken early in the morning, before many people were about. Shops are closed, some of the shutters are down, and curtains on the upper floors are drawn. He was interested in the buildings not the people in them or the people passing by, or even the signs and banners of the shops and businesses. He wasn’t interested in rain on the pavements or the early morning light or the calm atmosphere of the empty streets.

He’s caught some impressive architecture in the process of his work such as this now vanished building which would have been impressive in any Edwardian high street.

Or this somewhat sinister building.

The highly decorative façade looks decayed as if it belongs in a horror story, an impression enhanced by the closed shutters, deserted pavement and even the condition of this particular photograph.

The other feature which catches our attention is the shops themselves which offer products we see less of these days, and services we no longer require. The signage has an insistent quality which is still part of retail life however curious some of these examples appear.

The tobacconist and his high class cigarettes.

Gooch the boot maker also has an extensive range of travelling accessories according to the sign on the left.

People do get into the pictures though. Photography attracted interest in the early years of the 20^th century just like television cameras do today. Once I started looking carefully I saw plenty of early morning people. The policeman on his beat stands to attention as his picture is taken.

A woman leans out of a window taking a moment to stare out at the street coming to life before the working day begins.

At the back of 47 Brompton Road next door to the Aerated Bread Company Depot another woman in a maid’s uniform is at the window, her working day already begun. Look above her to the left. A cage placed in a window so the captive bird can get some fresh air. This was in the days when the air above Brompton Road was still fresh.

A delivery man with a barrow pauses to look at the photographer.

The man in the doorway looks like a waiter. Is he on his way to work, or just coming back to his room on one of the upper floors above the stationers or the corset-maker?

Here is a man on a ladder, precariously perched half way up a tall building. Not window cleaning I should think, but I’m not quite sure what he’s doing. There’s room for speculation.

This photograph gives a clue to the photographer’s mission.

The Great Northern Piccadilly and Brompton Railway Company were in the process of building the Piccadilly Line. The photographs formed part of a legal record of the condition of the buildings above the new line. But they have come down to us as another kind of record showing us a London street coming to life in the early years of a new century.

(Brompton Road Station incidentally didn’t have a long life. It turned out to be too close to South Kensington on one side and Knightsbridge on the other and never had huge numbers of passengers. It closed in 1934. If you’re travelling on Brompton Road you can still see the distinctive ox-blood tiling characteristic of the Piccadilly line stations if you look up the side streets on the northern side.)

The art school dance

I am reliably informed that the bus in this picture is an AEC Regent with a Park Royal roofbox body and restricted blinds and that the days when the 73 wheezed along as far as Richmond are now distant memories. My transport correspondent also noticed that there were some odd people crossing the road in front of the bus. Those would be art students I replied.

We sometimes think of the 1950s as those grey days between the war torn 1940s and the mind-expanding 1960s. It’s true that there was a great deal of austerity and conformity in the 50s but there were also great steps forward in fashion, music, theatre, architecture, arts and of course having a good time.

For much of the time art students got on with the business of education. Here are some of them sketching in the open air at Sloane Square:

And in Sydney Street:

Even in a studio:

(Apologies to those who might be offended by it for the slight amount of bare flesh in this picture. As it comes from the Central Office of Information this is government-sponsored nudity.)

At other times the art students were just doing what students normally do. Hanging around trying to look cool:

This group are definitely succeeding in looking good in the fifties. But there was other work to be done too such as making big feet:

And big heads:

Not to mention dressing up:

After all that all they had to do was present themselves at the doors of the Albert Hall either on foot:

Or even by car:

Get the big heads on:

And finally have an enormous fancy dress party:

Later on in the 1960s there was an album by the now obscure group Pete Brown’s Piblokto called “Things may come and things may go but the arts school dance goes on forever”. Not quite forever maybe but back in the pleasure seeking fifties it must have seemed like the fun would never end.

The big party was the Chelsea Arts Club Ball. Art students from all over London contributed to this annual event which ran from the early days of the Arts Club in 1908 until 1958 when it finally ceased in that form at least.

If you’ve got your costume ready we can step into the time machine….

Pictures this week came from the former government department the Central Office of Information, the library’s John Bignell collection and the archive of the Chelsea Arts Club.

Tales of the riverbank: Chelsea before the Embankment

I left you last week in Chelsea Reach among the boatyards and wharves at the western end of that stretch of the river. This photograph shows the intersection with Beaufort Street (then called Beaufort Row) at Battersea Bridge.

The road called Lindsey Row leads west towards Cremorne Gardens, advertised on the board at the left of the picture. (“Cremorne open daily, one shilling” – I can’t quite make out the opening time) To the right of the board you can see another sign proclaiming the existence of Greaves and son, boat builders. The house nearest the camera is Belle Vue House, one of the grandest in the neighbourhood. Its eminence has not deterred the three men leaning against the railings who are obligingly posing for Mr Hedderly.

I imagine them as a trio of idle fellows hanging around for want of anything better to do. Does the one on the right lack a leg? They are keeping a wary eye on Hedderly. Or perhaps they’re friends of his.

If we cross the road heading east we enter the  narrow passage of Lombard and Duke Streets which link Beaufort Street with Cheyne Walk. You can see some images of these streets in my Famous Fish Shop post (see list of posts opposite). This photograph shows the view from the river taken from the bridge at low tide with the river entrance to the Adam and Eve tavern .

It looks a bit ramshackle amid the haphazard arrangement of buildings which all backed precariously onto the river.

Beyond this section the riverside opens up in the area near the Old Church.

The man on the left is standing outside the King’s Head public house. The fence marks the bank of the river. Boats rest on the mud and shingle. It’s possible the waters crept up onto the road at particularly high tides as they still do occasionally today at Putney.

This picture shows the Old Church. It was almost totally destroyed by bombing in the War and reconstructed afterwards so although you can still see a broadly similar view today only the Sloane Monument remains exactly as it was. The two figures are slightly blurred but add life to the picture. Look at them more closely:

Their dress helps us date the picture to the early 1860s. The one on the right has a shorter dress so she is probably younger. They might be mother and daughter or sisters. You can only get so much detail out of photographs like these. You wish the younger one had kept her head slightly more still.

Further down Cheyne Walk the houses become bigger and more palatial as we approach the intersection with Royal Hospital Road. The painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti lived in one of the houses in this photograph.

There are still many working boats visible here and more wharves further east.

At the end of the road you can see a number of business premises but even high resolution scanning can’t tell us the name of the establishment in the pale building apart from the word Chelsea.

The next photograph is one of my favourites by Hedderly.

It’s an interesting view of the houses and some road works but look at the dude on the right (I think that’s the right word for him).

What’s he up to, in his stylish coat and bowler hat? Can you make out the person he’s talking to? It looks to me like he’s chatting up some young woman, possibly a maid from one of the big houses, if that doesn’t sound too Downton Abbey (or more accurately Upstairs Downstairs).

Despite the technical limitations of their equipment I think the early photographers like Hedderly already understood the artistic possibilities of their new medium. The portrait, the posed group photo, the naturalistic views of people and places. And in this case the candid photograph when the photographer catches someone unaware that they are being observed. So this man’s casual actions are preserved forever to show again that people in the past behaved in much the same way as they do today.