I was going to do another post in my Interiors series this week. There were a couple of other ideas bubbling under as well but Tuesday rolled round and none of those ideas were quite ready so I turned to our old friend John Bignell. I looked for a selection of photographs that would show some of the range of his work. Bignell photographed the famous and the obscure, the artistic and the ordinary. As a jobbing photographer he worked to order but he also worked for himself.

 He did fashion shoots like this one:

A model (unknown to me but I’m open to suggestions) in a Chelsea street.

Then there were catalogue jobs.

I think this was part of a tryout rather than the finished work but Bignell thought the series was worth keeping.

He was also out covering feature stories like this one at Battersea Park Fun Fair:

That’s the Caterpillar they’re getting out of according to my wife who rode on it in its final days.

Here’s another feature, where he followed his friend Paul Raymond to Clacton. The Raymond showgirls pose for some publicity pictures.

When he was bored with the glamorous jobs he sought out more authentic subject matter.

A woman feeding birds in Dovehouse Green – behind her is the Miller monument which is still there in the centre of the green which was landscaped in 1978.

A boy demonstrating the power of reading outside the first Chelsea Library in Manresa Road. Bignell may have set this picture up but it still looks spontaneous.

This one is somewhere in Chelsea too I think.

Is the girl shocked at the price of coley, or worried that she might have to eat it? (Some people used to think that coley is just for cats.)

Sometimes Bignell concentrated on landscape:

St Mary’s Church, Battersea reflected perfectly in the shallow water at low tide.

This pair of images contrasts night and day:

Looking down the King’s Road from the roof of Peter Jones department store. (Bignell had a bit of a knack for getting to the top of buildings with a good view.)

And then there was just hanging out with the bohemian crowd, as in this party at David Rawnsley’s Pottery in 1960.

This lady is Lucette de Fongere, about whom I also know nothing apart from her name. As with all the Bignell posts I would appreciate any further information.

This is another carefully posed picture:

It features  Regin de Cerchard and his wife who is pretending to examine a painting of Chelsea Reach and Lot’s Road Power Station. Bignell had many friends  among the art and antique dealers of Chelsea. That was 1955.  Fifteen years later he had other artistic friends.

Once again all I can tell you is the caption: filming under Battersea Bridge.

My final picture this week is one of my favourites, taken in Woolworth’s in Victoria in 1959.

I think this is one picture which wasn’t staged. As he so often did Bignell had the photographer’s instinct to take the picture at exactly the right moment.

It’s difficult for me to figure out if anyone ever knew what the Imperial Institute was for exactly. Possibly Edward, the Prince of Wales whose idea it was had a good idea. So although it was opened in 1893 when his mother was still on the throne you could call it an early instance of that Edwardian fantasy we’ve looked at in other posts. I’ve been looking at images of the Institute but not for once of its exterior and that strange tower which has survived longer than the rest of it but of its more interesting and far stranger interior.

The Grand Staircase hangs in the air as though it belonged to a fictional castle tower or a Piranesi engraving.

At dizzying heights, almost too far away to see barely identifiable mythological and classical figures are depicted.

So let’s enter. The door is closed. Two lithe big cats guard the stairs behind us.

Ahead of us is a long high corridor. At the far end light streams in through a window.

You can search all these rooms without finding a sign of inhabitants. There is a J G Ballard story about a seemingly empty and endless space station. The Institute looks a little like that in these pictures.

There is no one in the empty conference hall.

Or this room with its elaborate ceiling.

Some of those rooms are decorated in the style of the countries of the empire.

There are some spaces filled up with objects.

So have we entered a museum?

It looks a little more like a nation’s attic.

There are some signs of life here:

It looks like a deserted gentleman’s club.

But in this gloomy room the scattering of papers shows some evidence of the activity within:

And this room is waiting for a meeting but for how long will it wait?

Head downstairs and there are even hints of recreation.

Have we been here before?

After sixty years or so of inconclusive activity the rooms were empty again. You might have seen one diffident stranger in the distance…

But you could have imagined it. And now all the halls and rooms are gone.

Postscript

Some of these pictures are described as ink photos. I imagine that this is some process involving inking over a photograph to create an image which was easier to print in a magazine. But really I just don’t know and if anyone can enlighten me I’d be grateful.

]]> http://rbkclocalstudies.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/halls-of-empire-inside-the-imperial-institute-1893/feed/ 2 rbkclocalstudies Grand staircase 1897 02 Grand staircase 1897 03 Entrance Hall 1897 West corridor 1895 East Conference Hall 1896 British American Conference Room Opening of the Imperial Institute May 1893 British India Conference Room 1896 British Indian Exhibition Galleries Opening of the Imperial Institute May 1893 Ceylon Exhibition Gallery Opening of the Imperial Institute May 1893 Australian Conference Room 1895 Fellows Writing Room Opening of the Imperial Institute May 1893 Executive Council Chamber Opening of the Imperial Institute May 1893 Fellows Billiard Room Opening 1893 Canadian Conference Room 1895 Corridor 1961 http://rbkclocalstudies.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/in-a-white-room-and-other-modern-colour-schemes-1934/ http://rbkclocalstudies.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/in-a-white-room-and-other-modern-colour-schemes-1934/#comments Thu, 09 May 2013 00:02:58 +0000 Dave Walker http://rbkclocalstudies.wordpress.com/?p=1788 ]]> In one of the oldest houses in Chelsea, Syrie Maugham (wife of the best selling author Somerset Maugham) created a modern room.

This was the white room, a space entirely furnished in shades of white. It was the first of its kind. In the age of modernism, along with the revolutions in art, architecture, literature, music and dance, interior designers – the professionals and the amateurs had their own slant on modernism.

They didn’t stick with white though.

Here in this study room by Rodney Thomas are more pale walls and curved fittings, with some colorful touches,the most dramatic feature being the oversize clock.

Behind the walls of conservative apartment blocks and town houses in London the modernist revolution was carrying on in these new rooms. Here is another study, combined with a bedroom,designed by Angus Grant:

The decoration wasn’t all so restrained:

This entrance hall by Allan Walton has some trompe l’oeil features as does the dining room by John Armstrong below:

These rooms were designed for a “modern” form of life. I don’t know if the term lifestyle was in general use then but if not it should have been.

There was still room for the traditional activities of upper middle class life though, as in this music room.

It was designed by the owners themselves Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Below is a slightly grander music room designed by Oliver Hill:

The colour scheme is more sombre but the room still retains that uncluttered look the 30s designers were aiming for.

Last week I mentioned the hope of the Edwardians for the future. The early thirties were also optimistic in their way. Despite the Great War, the Depression and the ominous political developments in Europe these rooms also seem to me to reflect a hope for a future of technological and social advances.

The wall covering in this room by Ronald Fleming is constructed of squares of gold coloured straw paper arranged to make a pattern like wood veneers.

At her showroom in Sloane Street Betty Joel was presenting some flamboyant new designs in furniture and carpets.

One of her other living rooms, almost restrained by comparison:

Is that table pentagonal? Some more futuristic features below:

But note the horn of a gramophone player among the geometric lines of the furniture in this Ronald Dickens living room.

Throughout these rooms there have been artworks on the walls showing how the designers were allied with the artists of the day. This one was designed by Derek Patmore.

The other obvious feature of these rooms to my eye is that they look comfortable, much more comfortable than what had gone before. And if you were tired there were some colourful bedrooms to retire to like this bed / sitting room by Herman Schrijver for Miss Gladys Burton :

And for a good night’s rest you could do no better than this bedroom with its “convenient” furniture:

Looks good to me.

This week’s pictures come mostly from a book by Derek Patmore called Colour Schemes for the Modern Home, a 1934 survey of current trends in interior design.  They capture a fleeting moment of a quiet revolution in taste as ideas of modernity were changing into forms we still see today.

Finally let’s turn down the colour and look again at Syrie Maugham’s white room in the King’s Road:

The woman in white who stands in the white room is Nancy Beaton, in a photograph taken by her brother Cecil. A bright young thing if ever there was one. As part of her divorce settlement Syrie Maugham got to keep the house with the white room (along with a few other items such as a Rolls Royce)

Postscript

A bit of a change of pace for us after a month of transport related posts. As you have no doubt realised I’m not an expert on the history of interior design. But I’ve always found these pictures fascinating which is reason enough for showing them here. The picture of Nancy Beaton is from Stephen Calloway’s book Twentieth-century decoration : the domestic interior from 1900 to the present day.

This is the first in a short series of posts about interiors. Next week’s pictures will provide a dramatic contrast.

John Ruskin wouldn’t sit down for this picture. However poor the state of his health he felt it was unthinkable for him to sit in the presence of Rossetti so the great artist held him up. Ruskin was a man of high ideals and aesthetic principles. He had been one of the early supporters of the Pre-Raphaelites so Rossetti’s loose morals and the strange ménage at Tudor House wouldn’t have bothered him. But nevertheless it would have been hard to find two more unlikely companions in the whole of Victorian England. Rossetti represents the sensual side of the Victorian imagination let loose about as much as it could be. Ruskin of course represents the repressed imagination and it was that respectable side of his nature which drew him into collaboration with John Faunthorpe the Principal of the teacher training establishment in the King’s Road, Whitelands College.

[John Faunthorpe 1902]

Faunthorpe was a fan of Ruskin’s. He admired the great man extravagantly, idolised him even. So in1880 inspired by Ruskin  he floated the idea of starting a May Queen Festival at the College. Ruskin had form in this area, he had tried to start something similar at a school in Cheshire but parents had objected (Ruskin’s divorce / annulment from his marriage with Effie Gray and her subsequent marriage to Millais had been a great scandal). Between them the two men worked something out which combined Ruskin’s love of picturesque old English ritual and Faunthorpe’s desire for high Anglican ceremony. The notion of a may queen may also have appealed to  Ruskin because it involved pretty young women for whom he had a sentimental regard after the failure of his marriage and the derailment of his romance with Rose La Touche. The Victorians in general were given to sentimentalizing youth (perhaps because they frequently saw it snatched away by sudden disease and death, the very fate of Rose la Touche who died at the age of 27).

Ruskin donated a set of his books each year to be handed out by the new Queen, and paid for the design of the first in a series of crosses which were given to each Queen. The May Queen was chosen by the votes of the students (she should be “the lovablest and the likeablest” was Ruskin’s mawkish guidance to the voters). The first was Queen Ellen I.

Unfortunately for the ceremony Ellen was in mourning at the time and wearing black so a white shawl was found for her to wear. Ruskin pestered Faunthorpe for a photograph and then rather ungraciously said the Queen looked like she was 38. (She was 20). Although he did visit the College regularly he never attended the May Day ceremony. Perhaps he preferred the festival as a romantic ideal. After Queen Ellen the Queen and her maidens had dresses made for the occasion.

Ruskin had his protégé Kate Greenaway design a dress for the Queen which was passed on for four years.

[Queen Jessie 1891]

But as the Festival continued it became customary for former queens to return and take part in the festival so the Queen needed a unique outfit.

[A small and faded view of Queen Elizabeth II, 1893]

[Queen Annie II, 1895]

May Day is a festival dating back to pre-Christian times. It’s related to the Celtic festival Beltane and the Germanic Walpurgis Nacht. Faunthorpe wanted to emphasise the Christian elements, and Ruskin had exalted ideas about feminine innocence and purity. But despite that this version of May Day still had its May Pole, and retained the flowers, garlands, branches and wooden staffs which still have their older pagan connotations. Here’s Queen Annie again in her throne room.

They look like they’re starting to get the hang of it. Some former queens are present (see if you can spot Elizabeth II). They’re beginning to look a little like a female Masonic lodge.

Ruskin died in 1900 but the Festival no longer needed his blessing and seemed to grow in importance and complexity. If you remember I first dealt with the May Queen in Games for May. In that post I linked the Festival with the Chelsea Pageant just because I found the pictures together but the more I find out about the two events the more I think they belong together as part of the same current in the first decade of the 20^th century. The Edwardians seemed to have a propensity almost amounting to mania for dressing up and engaging in theatrical rituals and performances, especially out of doors. In an age of technological innovation perhaps they were reliving the myths and legends of an older England. An England of their imagination.

Behind the stern walls of the College was a quadrangle with ivy-covered walls where the ceremonies could take place out of sight of the busy streets outside.

[Queen Agnes I 1899]

The May Day festival took a whole day and required much preparation. The entire student body of about 150 got white dresses paid for by the college. There were services in the college chapel, a procession, an abdication ceremony, an election (although it became expedient to have the election before May Day so the new queen could be fitted for her dress) a masque, or some “revels”, and the crowning of the new Queen who would give out gifts of copies of works by Ruskin to selected students.

In 1906 there happened to be three queens in the College at the same time, the new Queen Florence, her predecessor Evelyn and the 1904 Queen Mildred.

Mildred in particular looks like she’s just come off the set of one of those 1970s Hammer films like the Vampire Lovers. Or (as I’ve said before) the cover of an album by a 70s English folk rock group, especially in the masque picture below.

They pulled out the stops on this one. Florence proceeded to her coronation with her maidens in tow.

And Mildred took the lead in a masque in which the students played flowers and trees and paid homage to her.

In 1909, the year after the Chelsea Pageant there were more elaborate ceremonies. Here is Agnes II, with her chamberlains.

On the throne with the Dowager Queen Dorothy.

Behind them is a painting of the 1902 ceremony. Check out the leopard skin.

There was even a special appearance by this lot:

Not real nuns of course, just some of the Pageant performers from 1908 who just couldn’t resist coming back for an encore. It might have been their last chance to join the procession with the women in white.

And oddly, it seems to me that at that point they had peaked. The May Queen Festival continued of course, carries on to this day in fact, but in the second decade of the century the ceremonies gradually became less elaborate and the College slowly seemed to stop making quite such a big thing of May Day. Or it could be that young women were getting more serious about their profession and less serious about quixotic ritual. I heard someone on the radio recently saying that the Edwardians had a kind of innocence based on hope, the hope that the new century was going to bring progress and prosperity. By 1910 perhaps the zeitgeist was looking a little less hopeful than before and the revellers decided it was time to put the costumes back into the dressing up box.

Still, there were many more May Queens at Whitelands and when they gathered together for the ceremonies there was quite a bunch of them, now engaged in charitable works as well as Christianised neo-pagan rites. They even had a leader, the Mother Queen who was the oldest of this select group.

The first May Queen, Ellen I, now out of mourning, in her own robes, leading the procession again in 1912. She died in 1923, mourned by her fellow queens, but never forgotten.

Postscript

That was quite a long post. Just as with the Chelsea Pageant I discovered a lot more material than I had imagined we had. Enough for another post next May Day if you can wait that long. I showed the pictures to a colleague and she said “it looks so pagan” – so it isn’t just me who thinks that.

The picture of Ruskin and Rossetti comes from the book the Victorian art world in photographs by Jeremy Maas. There is supposed to be a copy of it in William Rossetti’s memoirs but our copy had that page missing. There was an interesting picture of Maria Rossetti though which I intend to use in a future post.

Whitelands College moved to Putney in 1930 and has since moved again. It is now part of the University of Roehampton. The May Day Festival continues and they have May Kings now as well as May Queens. This year’s festival is on May 18th.

[A steam train at West Kensington 1876]

Look at this map, a section of Davies’s 1841 Map of London and its environs:

Davies’s map is interesting because it’s one of the first London maps to show railways. You can see the main line to Paddington and the West London Railway heading south towards the river with a proposed route alongside the Kensington Canal. You can also see the empty space between the comparatively built up Chelsea and the line of development along the Kensington Turnpike, the road from Hammersmith to Hyde Park Corner or Kensington High Street as we now know it.

Click on the map for a bigger version and look for the villages of Little Chelsea and Earls Court, the Hippodrome race course north of Notting Hill, Notting Barn Farm and Portobello Farm, the “proposed Norland Town” beside the Railway and the “proposed extension” following a similar route to the eventual District Line.

In the second half of the 19^th century those spaces were filled by housing, and the railways which linked Kensington and Chelsea to the rest of London.

This Kensington parish map of 1894 with the wards shaded shows how most of the space devoted to market gardens and open country was occupied by the end of the century and how the railways made their mark. (Apologies to Chelsea for being squeezed out a bit at the bottom but maps which show both parishes equally are hard to find before they became London Boroughs and eventually joined.) You can also see how development north of Notting Hill Gate moved northwards first to meet the Metropolitan Line at Ladbroke Grove and then to meet the main line.

As I said in the Gloucester Road post the stations were often built before the housing and the major roads. The District, Circle and Metropolitan lines crossed the two parishes knitting them together. The sub-surface lines weren’t actually underground for most of their routes (the longest underground section on the District / Circle line is the tunnel between Kensington High Street north to Notting Hill Gate) so they had a visible impact on the map especially in certain areas such as the Cromwell Curve where three lines (and the trains of three companies originally) met.

This is a rear view of Cromwell Road after building development showing the District Line rails in 1902. It’s by Ernest Milner, and has one of his characteristic faces at the window.

After the sub-surface lines came the deep tunnels (the actual Tube as Lanchester also points out) of the Central Line and the Piccadilly Line.

This one is the short lived Brompton Road Station opened 1906 and closed in 1934, being by then too near to both Knightsbridge  and South Kensington Stations.

This picture shows the Piccadilly Line station at South Kensington, which like the one at Gloucester Road sat right next to the Metropolitan and District Line Station.

The picture also has a good view of a comparatively small horse-drawn bus. The buses which had carried people around London before the railways could not compete in terms of numbers even when motor buses were introduced in the 1890s and early 1900s. But they would soon catch up, and I can’t leave the subject of transport without some pictures of the buses that have served Kensington and Chelsea.

A horse-drawn bus proceeds along Notting Hill Gate.

Below an early motor bus on its way to Westbourne Grove.

The bus routes we know today were established quite early.

A number 27 departs from Hammersmith bus station. The buses got bigger and more frequent.

This picture shows an AEC Regent on Kensington Gore in 1953 when the border of the Royal Borough was decorated for the Coronation. Below, the most iconic London bus of them all, the Routemaster, heading into Kensington in the 1960s (The Royal Garden Hotel is visible in the distance.)

Finally, on Kensington High Street the bus I use most frequently.

At any given bus stop the bus you’re waiting for is always the least frequent. Or is that just me? At least there’s the Tube.

Postscript

That was the last of my transport related posts which were part of our contribution to this year’s Cityread campaign. It’s been a bit of a challenge to do four whole posts on the subject so I hope the strain hasn’t shown and I’ve showed you some interesting images.

John Lanchester’s book is one  a  series of 12 . (Link)  They’re a bit of a mixed bag and I haven’t seen them all but I’d also recommend Paul Morley’s Earthbound (the Bakerloo Line).

Other writers have made the same points as Lanchester, such as Andrew Martin in his history of the Underground “Overground Underground”. but Lanchester’s little book was the first I read. It’s a subject with a large bibliography.

Next week a special post for May Day heading taking us right back into the depths of the Edwardian imagination.

I was bound to write about the Westway sooner or later. There is a complex story to be told about the historical, political, economic and sociological impact of its construction. But I don’t know if I’ll ever try to write that story. When I began looking at images of the Westway (and there are have plenty of them to choose from – the novelty of the structure drew amateur and professional photographers) it was the effect on the landscape, psychological or geographical, of a mass of concrete in the air above the streets that struck me first.  A picture like the one above is an almost abstract display of shapes and curves. Only the truncated row of houses at the bottom hints at the social and physical upheaval of demolished homes and divided communities that was one of the immediate effects of the new motorway.

Here a concrete curve hovers above the rubble and earth like an airship. You can barely decode the shapes in the background (prefabs on the right, a foot bridge on the left?).

The spaces below the road look subdued, almost empty.

Just a hint of graffiti, and is that a solitary figure?

Above the parapet, the road itself still looks under populated.

The landscape below it is getting ready for activity.

Earth moving vehicles are beginning the process of landscaping.

A canopy is erected.

People start to come and go past the empty spaces.

Traffic goes by above, moderately at first. Do buses ever go that way now? The one in the picture is not in service, on its way back to the garage probably.

Suddenly the new zone is full of movement.

Sporting activity begins as anticipated by the planners.

A contact sheet marked up for cropping but I prefer the whole image which shows the underside of the road. Here is another shot from a contact sheet:

Some activity was casual.Any open patch of land would do.

Some was exuberant.

And some, in the margins of the new zone was half hidden.

Postscript

Some of these pictures come from the archive of the now sadly defunct community history group HistoryTalk. Thanks to them for all their good work over the years.

This is the third of my transport themed posts which are part of our contribution to the Cityread campaign. I hope I haven’t stretched the theme too much. I don’t know what I’m doing next week by the way.

So where do you look for a car?

A garage is one place to start. This is one of those garages a few of you may remember where they stack the cars neatly but you don’t have instant access. Most of these cars looked pretty old even in 1970. In terms of design it was a transitional period (but aren’t they all?) between the staid fifties cars like that Rover you can see, the watered down versions of American designs and the hatched-backed days to come.

That’s a Ford Corsair on the left, with its odd pointed nose. Before we leave can I just invite any car enthusiasts to identify any of the cars in these pictures? There was a time when I could have done that but it was thirty odd years ago. I’m not really a car person. I don’t even drive. I just found myself around car people and got interested. Let’s get outside. See where we were?

Here’s another Ford:

But it’s only a lowly Anglia already fairly low on the meter of desirability even by 1970. What’s the one behind it? Addison Avenue must have been a quiet street. Just off it was Addison Place, a strange little converted mews kind of a street overlooked by Campden Hill Towers.

And that car in the foreground would I think be a Ford Consul, the fifties styled precursor of the Granada.

Not all of the British Leyland marques were hideous. That’s a Triumph Spitfire , a traditional British sports car. Other mews streets were full of cars.

Amid the old style cars in this back street of garages an expensive looking sports car, probably Italian. The odd thing I sometimes think is that expensive sports cars still look like that decades later as if that low wide look is the optimum shape.

The mews streets used to be filled with small garages servicing cars. Note the sign: Barclaycard Welcome – something of a novelty then.

A 60s novelty the Mini Moke parked in Linden Gardens. In the same street the opposite of a Mini Moke:

It’s also a Ford, a 60s American model, but I can’t make out the word on the side. I’m sure someone can help me out with that. Below a home grown model:

The Mark 3 Cortina parked in Christchurch Street. A bit of a classic itself. Nearby another puzzle for you:

I should know what this is, it looks so familiar. Someone tell me (No, not the mini.)

The first sighting of our quarry is back at the other end of the Borough in Clarendon Road.

The slightly cluttered styling of the Mark 1 Capri. And having found that one I came across another down in Earls Court.

Is that guy in the window coming back to close the boot?

In the very same street a Mark 2, at last an example of the car that sat in my cleaning bay in Poland Street.

There it is by the fence. For me the Mark 2 Capri represents the mid seventies like no other car, better than the high performance cars of the era. Seeing it in this picture reminds me of a time when the traffic was lighter, the cars were serviced in back streets and the Ford Capri was exciting and glamorous, if you can imagine such a time.

Postscript

As I said above if you can identify any of the other vehicles in these pictures or you have to correct any inadvertent errors of mine, please leave a comment.

Back in 1868 a gang of workers poses in front of the station they have built for the Metropolitan Railway. The road in front of the booking office is still a dirt track. Although the station is only yards away from Cromwell Road, which will become one of London’s major thoroughfares it stands on its own on an otherwise empty site waiting for development to catch up with it. The first Ordnance Survey map of the area shows some development on the east side of the road around Stanhope Gardens but to the west is a market garden and on the north side of Cromwell Road St Stephen’s Church also stands isolated.

Just below ground level are the platforms.

The interior is still recognisable today. I walked down a staircase in more or less the same position this morning. In 1868 steam trains will be running on these tracks so although this is an underground railway it will stay as close to the surface as possible with plenty of open air sections. Take a look at that roof by the way.

Jump forward almost exactly a hundred years to December 1969.

The original building is still there, stripped of some of its ornament, and the front of the building has been taken over by retail. Gloucester Road itself looked quite different in 1969. The area had become a tightly packed urban conclave of retail outlets, hotels and houses.

To the north of the entrance were more shops.

There was a narrow street, Lenthall Place, which has now gone and clustered next to the station a series of ramshackle looking shops.

There was this substantial building on the corner of Cromwell Road.

The specialist shops and the flats above have all gone now of course, replaced by this development behind which is a modern shopping arcade:

But I promised you two tube stations, didn’t I? And there are two stations at Gloucester Road. Look back at 1969 again:

There on the left you can see the second station, built for the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway in 1906 to serve their deep level tunnels and the lifts which took passengers up and down.  The Piccadilly Line then ran between Hammersmith and Finsbury Park. This 2013 view is rather clearer:

The colour image shows the distinctive ox-blood coloured tiling which was a characteristic of Piccadilly and Northern Line stations in Central London. The Exit sign is still visible on the left although the exit from the lifts is now through the old station. The Metropolitan and District Railway was then part of the United Electric Railway Companies. They ran both the District and Circle Lines (as they are now known) through the old station.

You can see the same twin station set up at South Kensington Station.(And in a larger format at Victoria main line Station which was also originally two separate stations.) The two stations at Gloucester Road were later joined up internally so they shared the same entrance and ticket office.

In 1969 Gloucester Road was looking very like a hundred year old building.

The signs are faded and the frontage cluttered.

That roof I told you to look out for?

Gone in this 1972 picture. In fact if it wasn’t for the station signs on the right you might think you were looking at a different building. I think this is an east to west view with an eastbound District Line train entering the station. Check out the weighing machine. Weighing yourself was once a common recreation for tube travellers along with trying to get chocolate bars out of those unhelpful machines which sometimes dispensed them.

The 1990s development next to the station gave us Waitrose and Boots and a covered way through to Cromwell Road was built on a deck which covered the platforms. The strange thing for me is that I can’t remember how it looked before. I suppose I didn’t use the station that much in those days.

If you look at a modern picture of the station you can see that some effort has been made to restore the original façade and balustrade.

The entrance is back where it started out and although the ornamentation on the top is not quite the same the 1868 building has survived more or less intact even though it is now dwarfed by the surrounding offices and hotels. The tube network has expanded but Gloucester Road’s two conjoined stations are still a destination for travellers entering London for the first time.

1969 pictures by John Rogers. 2013 pictures by myself.

This post is the first in a month long series which will be based on the general theme of transport and ties in with this year’s CityRead campaign. The book is Sebastian Faulks’ A month in December. Unlike last year when I had all four posts worked out in advance I have no idea what I’m writing next week, so keep your fingers  crossed.

The first point is one I made on that first post. We are used to thinking of the Edwardian period as the last great period of formal dress for women and men, the last gasp of 19^th century fashion and the ancien regime of costume before the revolution of the Great War and the 1920s. Sambourne’s pictures show another side to the early years of the 20^th century, a casual attitude to dress demonstrated by the mostly young women in them. The roots of the dress revolution are apparent from the 1890s onwards in candid photographs and picture postcards. Sambourne’s pictures are one instance of this movement.

The other point is another one I have made on previous occasions. We shouldn’t think of these photographs as curious items from past times. These pictures are of the present. When Linley Sambourne roamed the streets of Kensington with his hidden camera between 1905 and 1908 he was catching images of the now.

Have I spent too long on opening remarks? Let’s look at some pictures.

20^th July 1906 in Notting Hill Gate – even in summer gloves are worn and one of these two women carries a muff. They’re in a hurry, striding along, oblivious to the photographer.

Back in May of the same year in nearby Kensington Church Street:

This woman is slightly more formally dressed than the first two. Perhaps she is on her way to work. Sambourne liked to record women at work as below:

This picture taken in Cheniston Gardens shows a young maid engaged in the perennial and tedious task of cleaning the steps. You might think this is another example of Sambourne’s secretive gaze, spying on her working life but to me it has the look of a posed picture. Sambourne had many contacts in the Kensington area across the social classes – people he used as models for his studio photography and the young maid may have been one of them. I think it’s more obvious in this image:

A different set of steps, and (I think) a different woman but she looks to me as though she is responding to a request from Sambourne to hold that pose for a moment.

There is probably a great deal to be said about the interest shown in maids by gentlemen of Sambourne’s age and class but in the absence of firm evidence we can probably acquit him of improper thoughts. As has also been discussed on the blog and in comments, the concept of privacy with regard to photographs taken in the street was underdeveloped in Sambourne’s time. It’s probably true that as an upper middle class man he thought that his right to pursue his art outweighed any violation of his subjects’ privacy. (Some photographers still believe that today.)

To complete a trio of servants here is a maid taking a break, no doubt well deserved:

The next subject is someone much closer to Sambourne’s own class, a distinctly middle class married woman.

In May 1907 she is escorting her two sons along a tree-lined Cromwell Road with just a few horse drawn vehicles in the background. Cromwell Road looks more like a prosperous wide street of upmarket houses as it was originally intended than the major transport artery of today.

This is one of those pictures where the woman is looking right at the photographer as though she knows what he is doing.

I think this may be a picture of the same woman from behind. They were both taken on the same day in the same place so that may be a reasonable assumption.

Perhaps you recognize this woman:

I think it’s the same woman who featured in the first Sambourne post photographed in Earls Court Road in 1905. (I’ve looked back and forth comparing details of dress and features. I know that some of my readers are very eagle eyed so I won’t commit myself absolutely.) It’s a slightly less flattering image but that is a feature of candid photography. Everyone has seen poor pictures of people who normally look good in photographs. I would say she had been caught by the flash but I’m not sure if Sambourne’s camera had one. Actually the detail I like is the dog sniffing something out in the background so I hope she would forgive me for showing her not quite at her best.

This picture is another example of the big hat, still a common fashion item at the time:

This view is of Kensington Church Street, with some horse drawn buses in the background.

Another family group, from the front and the side:

This was in St Albans Road, well off the main streets of Kensington and well out of Sambourne’s main patch.

Another of his pictures from the rear:

Finally, I’ve been saving one of Sambourne’s best pictures till last. This picture is simply captioned Kensington. It looks a little like one of the streets running off Notting Hill Gate but really it could be any number of streets.

Sambourne captures a young woman of the early twentieth century walking confidently forward looking straight into the eye of the camera. Forget the photographer. She is looking out at us.

Postscript

Just as this time last year I’m about to start a month of posts related to this year’s CityRead campaign. The book is A week in December by Sebastian Faulks. The posts will all be transport related and the first will be A tale of two tube stations.

One of the many bloggers who wrote about Sambourne after my first post coined the phrase Edwardian Sartorialist to describe him. I can’t remember which one, but my thanks to her/him.

The Sambourne pictures belong to Leighton House Museum. If you would like to reproduce any of them in a book or magazine ask my colleagues there.

The other Linley Sambourne posts are here (Holland), here  (Paris)and here (at the beach).

The text is written by me so if you run a website based in Spain which likes to reprint vintage photographs why not write your own words?

For the Victorians the movement of water around London whether for drinking, bathing or washing sewage away was much more than a simple utilitarian process. It was one of the pinnacles of new technology, and an essential part of the growth of civilisation. The mastery of flowing water was one of the great skills of urban living. So the buildings and structures associated with it whether below or above ground were subject to the same aesthetic principles as any other grand public building. Hence the impressive Italianate tower above which stood at the peak of Campden Hill and dominated the local skyline for more than a hundred years. You saw it first in the Towers of Kensington post but as I looked deeper I found quite a few pictures illustrating the tower’s rise and fall.

The Grand Junction Water Works Company acquired the site in 1843 in order to build a high level reservoir but they added the pumping station and the water tower a few years later. The tower did not contain a tank but a series of pipes into which water could be pumped to gain extra pressure to power its subsequent progress through the water network.

The Tower was a popular local sight and can be seen in a number of pictures by local artists my favourite of which is this watercolour by Elizabeth Gladstone:

Remember that spire on the left.

The Grand Junction Water Works Company and all its assets were taken over in 1904 by the Metropolitan Water Board. The tower remained undamaged in both world wars. Here it is in 1964 surmounted by some kind of electronic device:

And again in 1969:

This picture shows the space around the works including part of the covered reservoir. The truncated tower of the “strange and wilful” St George’s Church. Aubrey Walk (1863) is visible behind the works and the tower block on the right is the equally wilful Campden Hill Towers at Notting Hill Gate.

This 1965 picture shows the intricate detail of the brickwork.

Inside the works was some impressive machinery.

By 1970 the tower was surplus to requirements and the land it stood on ripe for development. As luck would have it our photographer John Rogers was on hand to chronicle its slow demolition. Here the main pipe is exposed.

This was not one of those Fred Dibnah style spectacular demolitions. Because of the solidity of the structure and its closeness to a residential area the tower had to be disassembled almost brick by brick. Here is the first sign of the secondary pipe:

A man is working up there with a hand held jack hammer which would have made progress slow. Gradually the double pipe is revealed:

The pipe falls:

Finally the base is demolished. It is now safe to use a wrecking ball.

You can see how massive the walls of the tower were. The crumbling brickwork spills out of the gate.

The tower is gone. A few short weeks before there was snow on the ground and a family walked up the hill on a chilly February day.

The tower has joined the ranks of vanished buildings left behind as London moves on. But at least its passing was recorded.

Postscript

“Strange and wilful” is one of those slightly odd descriptive phrases from the Survey of London which I have come to treasure. “Pungently Burgundian” is another. If you come across any yourself in the Survey or any other architectural guides please send them. There might be a whole post based on them one day.