Street style 1906: Edward Linley Sambourne’s fashion blog

Stockholm, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, Istanbul, London. You’ll find street style blogs for almost every major city. Amateur and professional photographers hang around outside fashion shows or just prowl the fashionable shopping streets looking for (mostly) women wearing interesting outfits, taking picture of them and posting them on their blogs. The subjects of these pictures are flattered by the attention, or at least the ones we get to see are. This is a genuinely new phenomenon, a product of the internet, a distinctly 21^st century thing. Photographers have taken pictures in the street since it was technically possible but no-one ever did a style blog in the early years of the twentieth century.

But Edward Linley Sambourne came close.

A picture taken in Cromwell Road in July 1906.

Linley Sambourne was by 1906 the chief cartoonist of Punch. He’d had a four decade long career as a cartoonist and illustrator. He was also an enthusiastic amateur photographer. He had taken up photography as an aid to his art. He was a skilled draughtsman, obsessed with getting details correct but he preferred to work with a model. Photography gave him the ability to take pictures of family, friends and professional models which he could use as the basis for his cartoons. He took thousands of pictures in his lifetime most of them for reference purposes including dozens of images of military uniforms, national dress, models in pseudo-classical costumes and fancy dress of all kinds. His wife Marion complained in her diary that photography had become as much an obsession as a hobby.

Much of his work was in his home studio:

These blue-tinged photographs are cyanotypes, a  kind of print suitable for the cost-conscious amateur. The second image is of Sambourne’s daughter Maud striking a pose he subsequently used in a cartoon.

In the last decade of his life he also worked outdoors, on holiday and in the streets of Kensington.

What Sambourne captures in his street photography, and why his pictures are of interest to historians of fashion, is a certain casual look all the young women in them have, which is quite different from the formal image of Edwardian fashion you see in many textbooks and costume dramas.

A cyclist struggles with an enormous hat.

A woman Sambourne snobbishly describes as a “shop girl” strolls down Kensington Church Street engrossed in a book.

Without her hat this woman could walk down the Earls Court Road at almost any time in the twentieth century.

The one difference between Sambourne’s street photography and the pictures taken by modern style bloggers is that for the most part his subjects had no idea they were being photographed. Sambourne used a concealed camera. What do we think of this? Does it change your view of the pictures? In Sambourne’s defence it could be said that attitudes to photography were different in the early years of the twentieth century and that notions of the right to privacy hadn’t been completely worked out. But most modern photographers, amateur or professional wouldn’t work like this now.

From our point of view the images are part of history. The subjects are all dead now along with the man who took them. The photographs are interesting because they show us how women looked in a certain part of London in the early 1900s, so I show you some of them here because they are part of the history of Kensington.

I think a few of Sambourne’s subjects had worked out what he was doing. This woman looks curious.

So like her make your own mind up about Edward Linley Sambourne as another woman reads while walking.

And walks away from the camera’s eye.

Portobello Road in the 70s

Our last visit to the Portobello Road (see link in column two) proved to be quite popular so we’re returning there this week after a gap of twenty years or so. Now we’re well into what I think of as living memory. I made the point in the fifties post that some of the images could easily have come from the thirties rather than the fifties. By contrast some pictures from the seventies look almost contemporary to my eyes at least. The devil of time is as always in the details.

No Madam, I’m not going to go on forever about the nature of time and memory. Just to say that for me at least the concept of the present has expanded as I get older and it’s not too much of a stretch for me to consider any time in my adult life as the present day even though for some the early seventies have been consigned to the dustbin of history. You can stop yawning now Madam.

Back in the seventies then and for me any visit to the Portobello Road began here at the junction with Pembridge Road:

1973’s incarnation of the Sun in Splendour looking a little down at heel compared to the way it looks today. Pictures of Kensington or London in general from this time have some common characteristics. They look a little less crowded than modern streets, the cars look slightly alien (is that a Ford Frontenac on the right? Suggestions from car enthusiasts welcome) and of course you can imagine Regan and Carter dangerously swerving across your path in their Granada. Or Bodie and Doyle in a Capri for that matter. North Kensington was a favourite TV location at the time.

The road is narrow at this point. There were fewer shops and almost no stalls, although I recall one shop with hip merchandise on sale outside including boxes of bootleg LPs with their all white cardboard sleeves. The market itself didn’t really begin until you crossed Westbourne Grove and the slope down the hill got steeper.

This was and still is the antiques sector with dozens of stalls and the many arcades.

I don’t know if this man is a seller or a buyer but he looks like a market regular from one side of the stall or the other. Here’s another view slightly earlier:

Those three are almost certainly Saturday views. The view on a weekday would be more like this:

You can just see the spire of St Peter’s Church in the distance.

As the antiques stalls thinned out you began to see ordinary high street shops and family businesses. The stalls start to become devoted to food.

The Electric Cinema is visible in one of its periods of closure. The food market wasn’t confined to Saturdays but there were some weekdays when there were fewer stalls.

Eventually you came to the railway bridge and the Westway and a final set of stalls with books, second-hand goods of all kinds and yet more bootleg LPs. I don’t have a picture of this area in the same photo survey set as the others. The photographer was working on weekdays and there wouldn’t have been much to see at that point.  But in my memory the open area beyond the motorway seemed enormous, full of people. It was the epicentre of something although from this distance in time I can’t say what. I looked at the area on Google Street View this afternoon and it was much smaller than I remembered.

Past the Westway the street became much less busy. The view north from the junction with Cambridge Gardens:

In the final stretch to Golborne Road there was another of North Kensington’s many religious establishments, St Joseph’s Home across the road from the Dominican Convent:

Its bulk is disconcerting after the smaller scale of the market. At this point we seem to have taken a further step back in time.

I would never have made it this far on my Saturday afternoon trips to Portobello in the 70s. Somewhere around the Westway we would have found our way to a bus stop and either got the 52 back up to Kensal Rise, or the 31 making its way to Camden Town – in those days one of London’s most tortuous bus routes.

Here’s one final picture to get us back to the70s. The serious business of selling antiques which is both glamorous and seedy.

Postscript

I was told today that one of the stallholders featured in the 1958 photos I used in the Portobello Road in the 50s post from last year is still running a stall. She’s the woman in the checked coat here:

So congratulations to her. If you recognize any of the people featured in the blog I’d love to hear about it. I’ve met a few people who’ve found their way into the Local Studies collection and I always like to hear about them. Especially the three women in the first picture this week. Any ideas?

The sky’s on fire – William Ascroft

Last week you saw some of William Acroft’s Chelsea pictures, some finished pieces and some sketches. I told you how the Royal Society commissioned him to record the skies over London after the Krakatoa explosion. Before the distant apocalypse this is what he saw.

A bend in the river west of Chelsea, deep into the suburbs, by moonlight and below a view of Putney by day.

In 1880 a shooting star provides an omen of future events.

In 1883 the greatest explosion in modern times occurred. Although it was thousands of miles away the effects were global. World temperatures dropped by 1.2 degrees C. Ash and sulphur dioxide gas were flung up into the upper atmosphere to drift down across the world. Effects on weather and temperature lasted until 1888. Before colour photography the effects could only be recorded by an artist frantically scratching on paper catching what he saw before it disappeared.

A sunset in June. Imagine William Ascroft who would have been fifty in 1883 stumbling through fields  and country lanes carrying sketch pads and paints, working by moonlight to catch those fleeting colours in the sky.

“Riverside walk number 3″ according to Ascroft’s notes.

“Later. Sunset after a rainy day. No wind.”

August 23rd “Sky study”

Sky study 24

“Mortlake. Walk up riverside.”  Mortlake was some way out of London in the 1880s almost as isolated as it was when John Dee lived there.

This sky study is from 1886. It must have seemed like the sky would go on burning forever. A Victorian apocalypse.

A gloomy sunrise. But in contrast to that, and the shooting star before the explosion a rainbow.

In time the weather returned to normal and the skies became calmer. Ascroft still walked along the river, now nearer sixty than fifty.

The sky studies were the unexpected culmination of his artistic career, and his main claim to a place in  the wider history of art and geography. But I think that all his work is worth remembering.

Author’s message

Just like a genuine blogger I am guest blogging this week at the London City Read blog on the marriage of Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth. Here is the link:

http://t.co/VU8KsHxQ

or the actual URL:

 http://blog.cityreadlondon.org.uk

Kensington and Chelsea’s Dickens celebrations begin in April and I’ll be writing about Victorian topics for the whole month. You can expect the Library Time Machine to go back to Cremorne Gardens and Brompton Cemetery and a couple of other destinations.

What were the skies like when you were young? – William Ascroft

They’re just sketches in pastel by William Ascroft. Coloured lines on paper. Some of them are recognizable as riverside Chelsea. Others just suggest the familiar landmarks of the Old Church or the Old Swan Inn. But in all of them the skies are just as important as anything else in the picture. Sometimes  the setting sun bores through the image right at you.

The sky remains bright as the gloom envelopes the far shore. I get a sense of motion in the water, of the barges bobbing up and down.

In this picture the sky seems alight. Can you still see skies like this over London?

Here is a high tide, the river swollen. Pre-embankment Chelsea, Battersea Bridge just visible on the left.

It’s harder to see Chelsea in this one unless that’s St Luke’s on the right. It doesn’t matter so much. The subject of the picture is the light in the sky reflected on the surface of the river. Just as in the one below.

It doesn’t quite look like Chelsea.

I think this is further west – Putney or Chiswick. Ascroft roamed up and down the river banks. Not always at dusk.

This is in the morning at low tide near the Old Swan.

A closer view of the same scene. It looks a little like the point where Royal Hospital road diverges from Cheyne Walk. (You can see a photograph in the Hedderly post Tales of the Riverbank) Somewhere behind those buildings is the Physic Garden. Here’s the river gate of the Garden:

There’s that cedar tree you’ve already seen in the post on William Walter Burgess. Boatmen are working or possibly even playing a ball game by the gate and the Old Swan. There are many views of the Old Swan and hardly any of its successor the new Swan which must have been far less picturesque.

William Ascroft was a talented professional painter who exhibited at the Royal Academy but if he’s remembered at all today it’s for a particular job.

In 1883 the island of Krakatoa exploded. They heard the explosion thousands of miles away. The loudest sound in modern history it is said. Volcanic ash was flung high into the atmosphere and drifted around the world. Weather patterns did not return to normal for about five years. The Royal Society commissioned William Ascroft to paint the skies, particularly the vivid sunsets. A few of his pictures are in the official report.

The pictures in this post show Ascroft’s skills as a painter. He’s my favourite of all the artists in our collection. You can see how good he was at painting the sky. But If you look closely some of these pictures are dated 1872. They show “normal” sunsets, years before the Krakatoa explosion. I wanted to show you those first because I think the Royal Society picked their man well. I think Ascroft already had the right kind of vision, the right kind of obsession with sunlight at the end of the day.

The fire in the sky was already in him.

The sunset sketches are like this one – hurried, violent almost abstract. Have I whetted your appetite for more? I may do more of them next week.

The case of the missing chimneys: Lots Road Power Station

Lots Road Power Station is the overlooked older brother of the flashier and more famous Battersea Power Station. It never starred on an album cover. Unlike their cousin Bankside it hasn’t been turned into an art gallery. But when it was built it was the biggest in the world. For years it provided the power for the tube network. It survived the blitz despite being right on the Luftwaffe’s flight path. And unlike its cousins it sat on a little street by the river among the terraced streets at the industrial fringe of Chelsea.

It started generating electricity in 1905. The four brick chimneys belched out smoke for a good part of the twentieth century though not in this picture, which shows some proud men from the building company perched at the top:

They’re probably not the actual bricklayers.  Not being too good with heights myself my thoughts are of the photographer who must have had to ascend one of the other chimneys to get the picture.

Here’s the station in an aerial view of 1921.

You can also see the railway yard in front of the station where many years later the sumptuous dwellings of Chelsea Harbour were built. Look again at a wider view in 1936.

You can see Chelsea football ground on the right. You can also see the station in the centre of an industrial zone. Gasometers to the north, warehouse and factories on the south side of the river.

Which is fascinating of course. But I know what you’re wondering. What about those chimneys? Well take a last look at them in 1950 across the mud of Chelsea Reach:

In the background you can see Fulham Power Station with its row of four chimneys in line.

Now we move on to 1968:

Just three chimneys now, giving the building an unsymmetrical look. The station had converted from coal-fired to oil-fired generators. But it didn’t end there.

By 1979 a second chimney has gone. The station goes on providing power but the railway lands look quiet. It looks as though activity on the site had reduced to a much lower level. Look back at the 1921 picture. See how far the creek extended then, the barges and the lines of railway trucks. By contrast in the 1979 picture you can see how ready it was for subsequent development.

Lots Road power station stopped generating in 2002. There have been attempts at redevelopment and regeneration. The roof has been removed, a tradition in these cases but whatever unlikely plans exist are as far as I know currently suspended.

Some of these power stations are curiously resilient so who knows what the future may bring for Lots Road? It’s best to remember it at the height of its power, pouring out smoke into the cold air at dusk.

I hope you liked the aerial photos. We have a good many of those in the collection and you might be seeing more of them in the future.