Blythe House: 1977

Now, I know what you’re going to say.

Blythe House, Dave, it’s in Hammersmith. It’s not “on the border”, it’s way beyond the border. It’s in another territory. The sheriff will be after us if we go there. Well, bear with me, see if I can work something out. I saw Blythe House the other day on TV, in “Hard Sun”, I think. They showed that gate through which a large metal sculpture of a face is visible. Spotting locations is the curse of watching television in our house, whether it’s the London we know or the New York we think we know from years of virtual travel. Blythe House has been a frequent location on film and TV so although you might never have heard the name, you’ve almost certainly seen the place, from the outside, and maybe inside as well.

 

 

As had urban explorer Bernard Selwyn, who left us a large set of photographs dated 1977 when the building was nearly empty and he seemed to have the run of the place. I always knew I was going to use them on the blog one day, and that’s today. The Selwyn Collection, a valuable source for the visual history of west London, knows no borders, so this week let’s take our chances and steal away from our usual haunts.

 

 

Just gimme the facts, ma’am: Blythe House was the headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank (the forerunner of National Savings and Investment), founded in 1861. Blythe House was built between 1899 and 1903 and has all the hallmarks of a grand Edwardian public institution with a certain amount of municipal shock and awe in its appearance.

At its height about 4000 people worked there. The headquarters of the bank moved to Glasgow in the early 1960s and the Blythe House office were run down, finally being emptied out in the late 1970s.

There is still a sorting office in the building though and you can see some Royal Mail vans below.

 

I’m not sure whether Selwyn took all these picture himself or whether he acquired them from one of his sources, but they are a thorough collection, not merely the visible exterior but the roof as well.

 

 

Some pretty impressive vistas from there.

But bear this notice in mind when wondering around.

 

 

Especially if looking over the edge.

Either at the courtyards below

 

Or the other block (built in the 1920s), visible here.

 

 

Or the chimney (at one time the building had its own power station).

 

 

The impression is that you’re looking at a small self-contained city, like a little Gormenghast, with its own great halls and hidden districts.

The streets below seem very distant.

 

 

Inside, the staff were beavering away.

Is it me, or does this look like a bit of a skeleton staff?

 

 

The publicity department, I believe. (Some displays and posters are visible at the back.)

In Dickensian office tradition there were ledger rooms.

 

 

The amount of stationery on view shows how it was before IT reached the office. It makes me remember how long libraries lasted without a PC on every desk.

Now, paper systems look antiquated and clumsy (although I speak as someone who has frequent recourse to card catalogues, filing cabinets, scrapbooks etc in my work, so the days of manual retrieval of information have not gone yet.)

Below, one of the “small offices” has been tastefully decorated and turned into a nest for its inhabitants.

 

 

The woman with her back to us is wearing a dress with a characteristic 70s geometric design.

But by 1977 the building was sparsely populated. Many empty desks and work stations.

 

 

Some rooms were even deserted at his point, showing off the large spaces supported by pillars, the polished wooden floors and the glazed brickwork.

 

 

I love these empty spaces in public buildings. (Remember this one?)

There is a kind of half-life in deserted places.

 

 

As if the occupants have just slipped out for a moment.

 

 

Outside, even the car park had a pastoral feel.

 

 

Blythe House is now used by the V&A, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum as an offsite storage facility. There has been talk of opening it to the public as a Museums annex, which sounds brilliant. I would certainly go. But we’ll have to wait and see. Plans come and go, and brilliant places sometimes end up closed. Who remembers the Museum of Mankind? One of my favourite places in London, now long gone.

I saw the face sculpture in person while walking past the building on my way to a house in the area.  It was an area I’d never visited before, which I couldn’t even put a name to apart from the vague term West Kensington. London is full of places you’ve never been to, which can surprise you with places like Blythe House, well known to residents but sometimes unfamiliar to strangers.

Postscript

As always when I stray across the border of Kensington and Chelsea I find myself without the back-up of the Local Studies collection when it comes to further details on the subject. So I must refer you to my colleagues at Hammersmith and Fulham Local Studies and Archives for more on Blythe House.

As a bonus this week, I’ve been thinking about the pre-IT days of libraries and here are a couple of pictures to puzzle over.

 

This shows “the chute” at Kensington Library. On busy Saturdays, so the story goes, if the chute got blocked with books, a small member of staff was sent down the hole to clear it.

And this is an early attempt to issue books by tapping into the brain waves of library staff. (Note the protective sun glasses.)

 

It isn’t, obviously. But which hair-brained issuing system was it?

On the border 5: the Japan-British Exhibition 1910

The summer of 1910 was pretty dull apparently, nothing like the weather in London this year, or indeed the heat wave of 1906. So there was no reason why thousands of Londoners shouldn’t head towards the Great White City to see a new exhibition. This week we’re joining them, crossing the Kensington border into Hammersmith as we sometimes do, to see some of the wonders of the far east.

The exhibition followed the highly successful  Franco-British Exhibition of 1908 and the Olympic Games of the same year for both of which the White City site had been built under the auspices  of  Imre Kiralfy the man behind some of the most spectacular events at Earls Court

The exhibition presented many aspects of Japanese life, art and industry as these country based exhibitions had done before at Earls Court and the White City. This particular exhibition continued the European obsession with Japan which can be found in art and design since Japan was opened up to the western world in the 1860s. We’ve seen it before on the blog in the work of the artist Mortimer Menpes.  (And in his famous house.)

Visitors could walk among traditional houses and gardens.

 

Climb up landscaped paths, as these two women are doing.

 

 

And enjoy exotic vistas. You can barely spot where the painted backdrop begins in some of these pictures.

 

 

They hardly seem to be located in the crowded exhibition site with its other rides and attractions.

 

 

This picture shows the site with the the stadium . Note in the distance a gasometer and the tower of St Charles Hospital in north Kensington.

Actual Japanese performers enacted tableaux of traditional scenes.

 

Including warriors, as seen below. Londoners were already used to re-enactments of battles and historical events in shows like the wild west performances at Earls Court and elsewhere.

 

 

Sumo wrestling offered something new.

 

And for some there were martial arts skills to learn. Here a woman demonstrates how to see off some attackers even in modern Edwardian dress.

 

The Japanese government was also showing off the sights of the modern industrial Japan.

 

 

Which had already embarked on its own military / imperial actions. During the exhibition a Japanese warship was visiting the country to emphasise  Japan’s role as an ally of the UK.

For most visitors of course, it was the art and culture of Japan which mattered the most, whether the gardens…

 

Or the gods.

 

 

It was after all, just a pleasant day out. For some visitors it was perhaps almost too much.

 

A trio of distinctly European geishas have some pseudo Japanese fun with a tired young man.  We’re still obsessed with Japanese culture today and you can see it everywhere. I wonder if our old friend Yoshio Markino made it to the exhibition?

Postscript

This week’s images came from the Local Studies and Archives department of Hammersmith and Fulham, courtesy of their manager and mine Adrian Autton so thanks to him.

 

[Montage of postcards featuring the four seasons.]

Bignell’s travels: back streets and backwaters

We’re back with some more of John Bignell’s pictures from a box he labelled “rural London”. Some of them are not all that rural as we will see but some of them fit that description exactly:

 

Wanstead Flats according to Bignell’s writing on the back, about as rural as you get, and very far from Bignell’s usual subject matter. I’m dating it at about…..

Bignell strayed an even greater distance from London on some occasions. This is from a box marked “Stansted”.

A distinctly rural view with a country lane and a modest church. On the back of the print it says Chickney so the church may be St Mary’s. The village is a few mile away from the airport in Essex.

This is from the same set, a colour picture of Thaxted, only 20 minutes or so by bus away from the same airport. Bignell may have been here as the first stirrings of protest against London’s third airport were beginning. (Or not. I confess to a lack of knowledge of airport history). The parish church at any rate has an impressive spire.

 

This grand house was in the same general area but Bignell wrote nothing on the back. Can any Essex experts help?

 

He liked the view so much he tried a black and white version.

 

The next two pictures are also way off Bignell’s usual patch  but still in London, in Leytonstone Village.

 

 

A luxuriant garden and an overgrown lane. The woman sits just inside for a better view of whatever goes by. Below,perhaps nearby a slightly more urban street in the same area. The chimney cleaner’s wife enters her house perhaps smiling at Bignell while an elegant young woman walks by.

 

I think Bignell was a city boy at heart. There are quite a few urban pictures in the box.

Some of them are related to pictures we’ve seen before like this playground in Clapham

We saw those girls here, playing balls games, while that running boy tires himself out.

The church, once you can see it clearly is Holy Trinity, Clapham Common, not as I originally thought.

Others are content to walk, as in these pictures of Ebury Mews West in the Pimlico area. This group walk or ride for work.

 

 

While this man in a suit strolls along, hands in pockets,  minding his own business.

 

I featured one of these atmospheric pictures in the post called Bignell’s world of the strange. But it’s worth looking at the whole series.

They depict an odd little enclave off a side street in Westminster, Carlton Mews, shadowed and lonely.

 

Do you dare enter?

 

 

“No thoroughfare”

 

 

“Turning prohibited.” There seems to be a way up to an elevated section, a little street above the mews area, a little dilapidated.

 

 

With a solitary figure walking by. As i noted before it would be a suitable setting for a supernatural story to begin. ” I went toa rotting mews in an old part of London where a book dealer claimed to have a copy of……”

 

Let’s not go there, it’s not Halloween.

After that gloomy spot we’re better off outside, somewhere like leafy Dulwich.

Behind a wall a pleasant old house basking in sunlight.

Postscript

Like those pictures of Wimbledon, this week’s pictures simply show Bignell on the move, capturing moments in little corners of London. It’s something we all try to do from time to time, with mixed results, especially in these digital days when you can just point and shoot. Bignell needed to do most of the composition before he took the picture, so he got it right more often than an amateur would. But photography is a democratic art form and we all score a few goals by pressing the button at the right moment. Controlling the moment is the thing.

Postscript to the postscript

I’ve had more information on the Leytonstone Village pictures identifying the pub as the North Star, still a going concern. Further information on the area in this conservation area document:

Click to access conservation-area-browning-road.pdf

On the border 4: roads, railways and the ghost of a canal, 1983

After a bit of a hiatus we’re returning to the photographs of itinerant surveyor Bernard Selwyn and this time we’re following him on a walk around the rail tracks which partly follow the course of the old Kensington Canal, which at one time ran down the western side of Kensington and Chelsea and ended up at Chelsea Creek, (where you can still see some water). Selwyn was particular interested it seems in the rail line which runs past the station at Olympia (see some of the pictures in this post), alongside Warwick Road and south under West Cromwell Road.

An uncharacteristically quiet view of West Cromwell Road as it rises away from the junction with Warwick Road and curves towards Hammersmith.

Up the hill, with a closer look at those signs.

 

Below, the railway tracks. A man manages a quiet stroll along a major road on the 30th May 1983. (All these pictures were taken in April or May of that year.). The rail track running below the bridge is part of the West London Extention Railway which was built on the filled-in canal.

 

 

That office block ahead is called Ashfield House. Selwyn took a great interest in it.

As you get closer to it you can see it is separated from the main road by more rail tracks, which run by the rear of the building.

 

 

The tracks can barely be seen by motorists.

 

 

In the distance you can see the roof of the Earls Court Exhibition Centre, a massive presence on the skyline in west London. Oddly you don’t always see it from ground level as this picture showing the other side of Ashfield House demonstrates.

 

Selwyn examined the building from several angles.

Looking west, with an approaching tube train.

 

And east, with the same train passing him.

 

This is part of the District Line heading towards Earls Court. You see ahead of the train the tangle of tracks, bridges, a gantry and railway buildings as these tracks move alongside the north-south route.

 

 

Here, Selwyn changes his vantage point, looking south west. You can see the cluster of rail-related huts and small buildings.

 

 

He then, for some obscure purpose, took a look directly below him.

 

 

It doesn’t tell us a lot but it shows the level of his interest. Remember, in the day before digital photography you had to set up the shot, take the picture and wait for the result. The amateur photographer would have to hope for the best. That may be why Selwyn took so many pictures. Or he might just have been a little obsessive, for which we can be grateful, thirty years or so later. London wasn’t quite so tidy in the 80s, and there were still plenty of spaces in the city to capture the attention of urban wanderers whose interest lay in industrial locations and the hidden parts of the city.

 

 

This picture shows underground tracks meeting the main line which is just beyond a small fence. On the left you can see the rear of St Cuthbert’s Church (the roof and spire are a little hard to make out in this picture ). On the right of the picture is that other prominent landmark of west London, the distinctive but somehow obscure Empress State Building. You can see the church spire clearer in the view below, looking straight down the line showing the wide space between the tracks and the various buildings at the rear of Philbeach Gardens. More of the canal next week but it was in some sections pretty wide.

 

 

Just beyond the track is a road which runs behind the church. If you look back at the post about the church you will find a 19th century picture of the church hall. Here it is in Selwyn’s time.

 

 

Now back to his view from the bridge. Or was he closer? Had he found his way to a better vantage point using his skills as a surveyor and/or an urban explorer?

 

This post has really been a prelude to next week’s, which also continues a series. When I scan pictures for a possible use on the blog I don’t always know at the start of the process what stories are going to emerge from the images. Maybe Selwyn worked the same way.

Postscript

This post moved back and forth across the border with Hammersmith and Fulham, an interzone which was one of Selwyn’s favourite haunts. He moved from the very north of Kensington to the river edge of Chelsea as we have seen in several posts. Next week’s post is almost entirely inside the boundary of Kensington and Chelsea. So here is a Hammersmith bonus for you.

 

Where West Cromwell Road met North End Road was this pub, called the Three Kings, next to West Kensington tube station. It’s now called the Famous 3 Kings but for a short period from 1975-1980 it was the Nashville Room (or Rooms?), a music venue, and that is what I thought when I saw the picture. A few of you may have seen some famous bands there. On an obscure personal note I was once told that a doppelganger of mine sold newspapers and magazines at a stall in the station. I never went there to find out.

Robinson and Shakespeare: Dreaming

Some of the illustrated editions of Shakespeare I’ve looked at in the last year were published by Hodder and Stoughton – Dulac’s The Tempest, Thomson’s As you like it and Robinson’s Twelfth Night. Most recently I looked at Arthur Rackham’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream which was published by Heinemann. I read recently that the Hodder books were an attempt to compete with and surpass Rackham’s MND which is sometimes said to be his masterpiece. Despite the different publishers the books followed a similar format – 40 coloured plates with some additional black and white pictures and decoration. Thomson followed the same formula when he did the Merry Wives of Windsor for Heinemann (a blog post looking at those pictures will be coming up in the next month or so, almost certainly the last of these Shakespeare related posts). But when Robinson was asked to do his own version of MND for Constable in 1914 he went his own way and produced a completely different kind of book with only a dozen colour plates and many more black and white pictures.

Arthur Rackham’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was acclaimed as one of the finest illustrated books of its day so its reputation overshadows William Heath Robinson’s version of the same play published only six years later. To my mind however, the Robinson version is better.

It isn’t a competition of course. Rackham’s version stuck to the formula for that set of books, Robinson wisely tried another way.

Many of Robinson’s picture are openly comedic, almost cartoon-like  in a way that Rackham doesn’t attempt. But many of them are very special and striking, – minimalist, stark, graphic, modern – where Rackham’s pictures are intricate, detailed, grotesque and resolutely Victorian. You can enjoy both. But give Robinson a chance.

The monochrome pictures show Robinson’s debt to Aubrey Beardsley. (Or does any intricate black and white image from this period echo Beardsley?)

The colour plates, like some of the pictures for Twelfth Night, have an interesting quality about them. Something like a stage set. Or something like a dream in fact. A not quite three dimensional space. An exterior masquerading as an interior.

A scene with classical costumes and a small number of props. A floor with a regular geometric pattern, as we saw in some of the Twelfth Night pictures.

Minimalism is the key here. A cool  place with the air of antiquity.

 

Calm beings , human or semi-supernatural sit and wait by the side of a calm pool, its surface barely disturbed.

When action occurs it is magical. Titania shakes smaller faeries out of her hair, sending them on their way to serve her. She poses like a dancer.

 

It’s a striking image, perhaps my favourite. Robinson shows the raging sea but somehow you imagine the sound muted as she shakes her hair and the wings rustle. Robinson uses the blank space in the pictures to add to the sense of distance and unreality. As below.

 

 

 

He also uses blocks of black to convey the mood.

 

This makes the coloured prints leap out as in this scene of lush foliage, water, and a temple.

 

The major  characters are visible, but sometimes seem like features in the landscape.

Oberon, casting his spell while Titania sleeps, accompanied by a pair of perturbed lesser fairies.

Puck squatting on an overgrown pillar.

 

And Bottom. Here again, at a distance we see. We see his companions retreating at the sight of his transformation.

 

 

Later, he sleeps and Titania seems quite content with her new companion.

 

 

Robinson’s lesser fairies, like Rackham’s,  also look like a different species but don’t have any of the repellent qualities of his insect-like creatures.

The forest of the play is a dream landscape of ruined temples, broken columns and obelisks around which the fairies play.

 

 

An almost science fiction book cover image of an overgrown landscape around a temple as the fairies stream past.

 

 

And Puck says goodnight.

 

Postscript

Taking my cue from the pictures my comments have been quite minimal. I’m posting late this week because as sometimes happens the post stalled about half way through and I had to wait for inspiration. Inspiration didn’t quite come so I fell back on the pictures. You can always rely on them. Next week, inspiration might arrive, or (whisper it), Isabel’s latest post might be ready. Either way there will be something here for you to look at.

Thanks again, for the final time, to Peter Collins for loaning a copy of this wonderful book.

 

Water: Bignell’s travels

I seem to have Bignell on my mind at the moment. I assembled a set of pictures for a recent post mostly taken in Wimbledon which I thought were very pleasant and evocative and I didn’t realise they were part of a larger group of pictures. Someone has been doing some Bignell related research at the library and I went looking for negatives only to find that some of the stacks of yellow photograph boxes contained prints, among which was a set Bignell called “Rural London”. He had evidently roamed around looking for parts of London which looked like the countryside, mostly in west London but occasionally going as far as Leytonstone and Wanstead. Actually I think he got sidetracked a bit because some of the pictures look decidedly urban to me. I decided to start by looking at the views featuring the river, or streams and ponds, because I like waterscapes .(See this post).

Some of them link up with some of the individual pictures I’ve used on the blog. Like this one:

I think we saw some of these boys before, playing about on the river, where the houseboats are moored west of Battersea Bridge.

If you look at the south shore you can just see St Mary’s Church. The thing I always remember about it is that William Blake married Catherine Boucher here in 1782.

 

Here it is at high tide one of the few surviving buildings from this era. A slightly different view below shows all the giant lettering on the Silver Bell Flour Mill. You can see another view of the church and the former surrounding buildings in this Bernard Selwyn post.

If we follow the path further along along the south side of the Thames you come here, another industrial stretch of building at Mortlake gives way to a tree covered path, now part of the Thames Walk.

The path as I recall it from walking part of the Thames Path when my son was younger gets quite narrow as you make your way to Kew.

Let’s take a watery detour south back to the Wimbledon of that recent post. I feel we’ve seen some of these people before.

Engaged in that traditional pastime of messing about at the edge of a body of water on a warm summer day.

In this picture the mother of some of the party attempts to move them for a pleasant stroll, although not everyone is convince that’s a good idea.

In any case for a casual picture Bignell has produced a marvelously evocative picture of that lazy summer day.

While I’m on the subject of detours a quick verbal sidetrack into the question of dating. I said in the Wimbledon post that the pictures were taken in 1970 while Bignell was living in Tedworth Square (he lived there roughly from 1963-1975). Most of the pictures are stamped on the back with that address. But some of them are also stamped with his previous address in Trafalgar Studios in Manresa Road. (He was there until 1962. The purpose built artists’ studios Trafalgar Studios and Wentworth Studios were demolished in the 1960s). So we have quite a long span for the possible dates of these pictures from 1958 to 1975. Some of them look to be on the early side of that, judging by the clothes or the hairstyles. For others it’s difficult to tell.

Barnes Bridge, with a pleasure cruiser, another timeless scene. From this point there are a lot of pleasure craft on the river.

Like here at Richmond.

And here with that other traditional feature, a ferry.

In the next two pictures the hairstyles provide a clue to the date.

Surely the reason why he took two pictures. The woman and the girl  both have striking holiday hairdos.

Any hair experts who could put a date to the picture would be very welcome.

Let’s leave the riverside suburbs for now and get back to what I think is the Serpentine on another summer day.

I’ll come back again to Bignell’s travels on another occasion. If anyone has any thoughts on dates or locations please leave a comment.

Postscript

The post I was going to write this week is not quite ready as I’m getting some informed input so forgive me for returning to Bignell so soon. However I’m sure you’ve found these pictures interesting as I have, and the post did prompt me to doing some research on Bignell’s various addresses which was long overdue.

Agitprop: some pictures from the Mike Braybrook archive

When I decided on the word agitprop for this post I actually had to look up the term up before starting to write to check the actual meaning. It was a term that I heard or read a lot back in the 1970s when I first came to London. The various dictionary definitions boil down to art forms with a political message, derived from a Russian combination of words for agitation and propaganda. But when I was hearing it for the first time it seemed to refer to any anti-establishment activity or literature. Time Out, I recall had a section headed Agit Prop. (Or am I imagining that?). And it was all wrapped up with the underground press, protests and campaigns of every kind. There was a lot of protesting back then. I remember a campaign to save a residential square near my college from developers, and another against the lack of use of Centre Point (then not fully occupied). This was of course before the internet, mobile phones, emails, instant messaging, social media and citizen journalism. There was just the printed page, and makeshift newspapers, magazines and handbills circulated around colleges, schools, community centres and anywhere where people gathered. And word of mouth of course. Community activism was everywhere, not least in North Kensington where there was plenty to complain about.

These days academics from all over the world are studying urban protest and community action and their research sometimes brings them to libraries like ours which have been collecting what we call ephemera for years. Ephemera consists of,  as the name implies, the throwaway scraps of paper which were only intended for the moment, but which can turn into useful historical documents if someone hangs onto them. That’s part of my job as a professional hoarder, keeping scraps which may turn into the raw material of history.

 

Mike Braybrook owned a printing business at various locations in North Kensington and it was he and other like him who printed the posters, handbills and free sheets which promoted activism in west London. I never knew of him till after his death in February 2007 after which a group of his family and friends came together to preserve an archive of his work. The Mike Braybrook Archive was recently added to the stock of the British Library. I’ve had some involvement with the friends who have worked on the archive and have scanned some of the material and been able to keep copies for the library. So today’s post is not intended as a comprehensive view of the archive, but just as a snapshot of an era of urban activism in London.

The artwork on these posters and handbills often looks crude.

The creators often had little to work with in the way of time and materials. But the hand made look reminds us that this was an era of do-it-yourself art. The punk movement came out of this time, with its cobbled together fanzines and cover art.

Some posters were a little more sophisticated, and showed some artistic flair.

The archive doesn’t just contain political material but also promotional material for community events like the Notting Hill Carnival.

See the logo at the bottom, of the International Times (along with Oz and Frendz, one of the leading “underground” newspapers)

Other events were not quite so well known, and were concerned with fund raising for local projects, such as this one, near one of London’s iconic locations.

Or this, at a slightly less famous venue.

There were famous causes and a few famous names.

Perennial London issues.

With radical solutions.

Not to mention folk demons from the past.

And familiar, if perhaps naive, images of rebellion.

(I’m not sure when this imaged was created or what it was used for – any suggestions?)

I’m presenting this as a little bit of history without commenting on the issues themselves. But people are still angry and are still protesting even though methods of getting your point of view across have changed. Some of these issues remain current. Some of the imagery has stuck with the popular imagination.There is still plenty to protest about.

 

Postscript

The Mike Braybrook Archive was deposited in the British Library in December 2016. The material is not yet ready for access but future researchers will find it a valuable historical source in the years to come and Mr Braybrook’s family and friends are to be commended for their work in preserving it for posterity.

 

 

 

 

Bignell’s world of the strange – an anthology

John Bignell was a jobbing photographer for most of his working life and took photographic assignments wherever they took him, from the banks of the Thames to ancient Greek cities. Or just round and about in Chelsea. I once had to look for something in the Chelsea News and went through an entire bound volume of a year’s weekly papers and found at least one photo by him in almost every issue. He covered news stories, did catalogue shoots and took portraits. He did what used to be euphemistically called “glamour” work (although some of the pictures in this genre look a bit odd, rather than erotic,by modern standards ) and documented burlesque shows at the Chelsea Place and elsewhere. And sometimes, when the mood took him he took pictures which now look like some kind of 1950s idea of illustrations to 21st century urban fantasies. I’ve featured some of these before as lone items but I’ve wanted to collect them together along with some more of his “strange” pictures. So some of these images will be familiar to regular readers and some won’t. But all of them are in some way weird or eccentric.

I realise that I am imposing something of my own love of the uncanny or the Fortean onto these images. But go with me. These two,for example,look they belong in an adaptation of a Neal Gaiman story. If Neal Gaiman had lived in the 1950s that is.

“Virtue fights back”, 1955. I used this in December 2014, and made the connections with Gaiman’s book / TV series Neverwhere and Christopher Fowler’s novel about another London Above, Roofworld. This could be the same duo.

“Satan triumphant” 1958.

Actually I think the models are the same, Desiree and Pierre, from the Chelsea Palace. Here they are on stage as “apache” dancers, a favourite cabaret theme of the time.

 

This picture was also part of a stage show, continuing the “claws” theme.

Never mind the knife, Madam. pick up the ray gun!

Bignell had started playing with strange scenarios as far back as 1949, in these two pictures, illustrating Cinderella, in a King’s Road antique shop called Horace Walpole.

The two ugly sisters are represented by dummies with the stuffed heads of deer.

Seedy and sinister like something out of a fantasy by Powell and Pressberger, which leads us to the next image.

This picture from 1958 was entitled “Probably the most widely seen eye in the world.” The eye belonged to the Mayor of Chelsea’s mace bearer and featured in posters and publicity for Michael Powell’s ill-fated film Peeping Tom, which more or less ended his UK career.

On the back of one print of the picture Bignell has written a reference to Susan Sontag’s book “On Photography”, even noting the page number in the Penguin edition of the mention of Peeping Tom. There’s nothing particularly illuminating there but perhaps Bignell wanted to remind anyone who read the caption that someone thought the film was a serious piece of work. There seems to have been a lot of moral panic about it when it first came out, which seems almost inexplicable in the light of what we’ve seen since. Following Bignell’s lead I refer you to David Pirie’s “A new heritage of horror: the English Gothic cinema” for an account of the film and its reception.

Continuing the gothic theme is this atmospheric picture of a respectable looking man alone in a dark alley, actually Carlton Mews, near Trafalgar Square.

He looks a little like a character in an M R James or Algernon Blackwood story on his way to a supernatural rendezvous.

Less morbid is this picture,  of an ecstatic dancer named Lyn, in a Margaret Morris style pose on a beach at Foulness in 1956. Bignell entitled it Lyn-a- leaping

Next a picture from 1955 (or possibly 1956) that is wrong on many levels.

It was entitled “Ancestor worship”, to add more misconception to the wrongness of a Frenchman in a gorilla suit holding a juvenile chimpanzee. (Yes, it was Pierre again.) What did they imagine the young ape was thinking? He can’t have been fooled for a second, so perhaps he thought it was just another of the inexplicable things the humans did from time to time. This was at Chessington Zoo, a perfectly reputable establishment where they probably still had chimpanzee tea parties in the 1950s and other anthropomorphic entertainments, so some of the apes would have been used to close contact with people.

Bignell couldn’t resist another photo of the “Chessington gorilla”. Here he is with his partner Desiree again.

Although this is also a strange picture it will offend no hairy humanoids, and might interest human or non-human lovers of wacky cars. These so called bubble cars used to be seen around the place in the 50s and 60s. Motoring experts will correct me if my identification is wrong but I think it’s a Heinkel. (Interestingly there was another variety of bubble car made by Messerschmitt – what prompted aircraft manufacturers to make tiny cars?)

The last picture is simply a salute from the master of the revels, Bignell himself, with his eye on the camera, and the viewer.

For the record, and I know a few of you will wonder, they’re at the Lord Nelson (later the Trafalgar) in the King’s Road. There are two dates on the picture, 1968 and 1954. The earlier one seems more likely but you never know in Bignell’s world of the strange.

The trouble with Bignell

The trouble with the work of John Bignell and writing about it is that for most of his career he was, as I said in the first sentence, a working photographer going where the work took him, and fitting in the more personal / artistic work when he could. For most of his career he doesn’t seem to have concerned himself too much with his place in the history of photography. When he eventually did a book it was called John Bignell: Chelsea Photographer. It’s a good book but it established him as an observer of Chelsea/ London life. That’s not a bad thing in itself but I think he was so much more than that, as photos like the one in this post and others show.

I’m going to carry on writing about him and posting photographs by him. One of these days perhaps the wider world will recognize him as a great original.

Postscript

One of the many great qualities of the Bignelll collection is that you’re always finding surprises, or variations on photographs you thought you knew, a different print or an unexpectedly informative caption in Bignell’s hand. As often happens while trawling through the collection for this post I came across further ideas for new posts. There could have been more on childhood in the 50s for example. There’s probably a possible post about Wimbledon Common too or more on Bignell’s models. To spare your sensitivities I’ve never done a post on his glamour work but that too is aesthetically interesting . Strictly speaking the nude and the sundial (featured here) should be in this anthology  as it has a few mystical connotations, with a second picture from the same session but to keep this post safe for work we’ll keep that one back for now. We’re used to thinking of the 1950s as a staid, conventional era, but there was plenty of strangeness bubbling up under the plain clothing.

Before the Westway: a North Paddington skyline

This week we have the long awaited return of my occasional co-blogger Isabel Hernandez who grew up in the area  sometimes called North Paddington and has many memories of it as it changed in the years around the building of the Westway. Like myself she has been looking closely at the photographs of Bernard Selwyn.

 

The city skyline changes over decades much as mountains change shape over centuries. Our small local areas, places we call home, or used to call home, places we are familiar with, are no different. These urban cityscapes seem to undergo a makeover every fifty years or so. From the overcrowded terraces of the Victorian period to the later concrete brutalism of the 1960’s, we are now witnessing the era of glass and mirrors built in angular shapes in what is now contemporary modern architecture.

Still, the shadows of the past remain in photographs and to continue with my study of the Westway (Paddington-side) I thought I would share with you a few more images of this corner of London before the infamous Westway motorway was built.

Below is a panoramic view of North Paddington bordered by North Kensington at the top. You can see the Kensal Gas Works and the St Charles’ Hospital tower, formerly the Marylebone Infirmary. [Click on the image to see a bigger view]

The Great Western Railway to the left cuts unimpeded through the built-up area.

This is the same view a a short time later. The second tower block – Oversley House – is under construction.

Below,a closer view. In the background you can see Ladbroke Grove bridge more clearly, connecting North Kensington to Paddington. If you look closely there is also a footbridge on the left that appears to have a tree growing out of it. Obviously it isn’t, but from this angle the bridge resembles a horizontal chute. It wasn’t a very appealing crossing, but it was a shortcut through to Westbourne Park and North Kensington. I made use of it many times, sometimes late at night, probably not a very wise thing to do with hindsight, but it saved time. The dilapidated Victorian houses, a stark contrast to their taunting new neighbours, await the bulldozer. Nowhere was there a more densely packed neighbourhood than in this part of Paddington.

 

The houses come down and a temporary wasteland is created, with the exception of these houses in the foreground. They do seem a little grander than the terraces behind them and I wonder why they are still standing at this point when their neighbours have been demolished

 

The strange case of the solitary houses. I suspect they were slightly more upmarket than the usual fare in the area. There is also the interesting feature of the residents coming and going as has always been their routine perhaps; shopping or simply getting from one place to another. The lady (left of the house) probably had no idea she was being included in a photographic survey.

 

 

If you like trains, then the Great Western Railway before you would have been a spotter’s delight. Below is possibly Alfred Road or Torquay Street in the pre-redevelopment period. There is a builder, or certainly a very brave man,who appears to be intently prodding the side of a roof with a stick. By contrast an elderly gentleman with a walking stick is passing by, perhaps studying the changes in his area. Although there is a lot of pixilation when studying photographs at close range, when they are enlarged there is still enough to intrigue us.

The juxtaposition of the concrete towers to the dilapidated, slum terraces is a striking image – like two Lego blocks strategically placed inside of a crowded moat. Although you cannot see it, running parallel to the two tower blocks is the Grand Union Canal.

Below is a composite image of three photos showing the lower end of the Harrow Road. None of the shops seen here along the length of the long street now exist. Many have been replaced by the various convenience stores and take-away outlets you see today. On the corner of Bourne Terrace the Stowe Club was opened, now a doctor’s surgery and offices I believe. Many residents within Paddington and North Kensington did a lot of their shopping along the Harrow Road.

Westbourne Grove, by contrast (to digress a little), was more the Bond Street of the area with William Whiteley identifying the road as having future potential once the underground railway opened in 1863 and many more transport routes being opened up. He opened a small drapery in the area, tentatively doing what is essentially market research and gaining experience before expanding to what later became the department store, Whiteley’s of Queensway, attracting and catering for the wealthier clientele residing around Bayswater and Hyde Park.

Here is another image of the same area, magnified a little to give us more detail. If you look closely you will see the ‘Tardis’, a police box, no doubt placed there to keep an eye on things whilst the area was undergoing its concrete revolution. A billboard to the left advertising glue is almost comical given the toy-like remodelling we see from this perspective

 

 

In the picture below, the Post Office Tower, the highest building in London at the time, can be seen in the distance. It is almost impossible at this point to imagine the Westway being a part of this landscape. The Harrow Road here is clearly seen under an open sky. Within a few short years all of the buildings on either side of the Harrow Road in this image were demolished, and the Harrow Road itself partially covered by the huge motorway above it. Engineering ingenuity in the name of progress or engineering folly – a question that is still debated today.

Another composite image I pieced together looking north:

 

I had to include this one as it’s my old address – Gaydon House. I lived there for about 26 years. That is a long time to be anywhere. The rather forlorn, gothic-looking tree in the foreground appears in quite a few of the photographs before it was unceremoniously cut down to make way for more flats and other younger saplings ready for the next generation. All remnants of what came before, almost vanished within a ten year span.

Below is Westbourne Park Villas. It runs parallel to the Great Western railway on the other side of the tracks. The spire of St Matthew’s Church can just be seen to the right of the image and in the middle you can just about make out the dome of Whiteley’s. A little behind that is the dome of the Royal Albert Hall. On the left, along Bishops Bridge Road, are a series of buildings that make up what was known as The Colonnades up until recently, before Waitrose took over. Further back, (I had to really expand this image), you can make out the four chimneys of Battersea Power Station. After being derelict for many years, and a few investors later, it is now undergoing a major redevelopment: the usual combination of luxury flats and shopping outlets so typical of London now.

Here’s another view of Westbourne Park on the other side of the tracks, looking further west towards Notting Hill and Kensington – an interesting mixture of modern flats and late 19th century villas.

 

 

And finally, a colour image of the Harrow Road most likely photographed by Selwyn from Wilmcote House, the first tower block to be built of the six now in existence. Two buses (probably the number 18) can be seen making their way north. Interestingly there existed along the Harrow Road a 2 ½ mile track from Amberley Road to Harlesden around 1888 for trams. These were replaced around 1936 by trolleybuses and later still (1961-2) by motorbuses such as the ones you see in this image.

As always Selwyn’s wonderful collection of photographs fails to disappoint. Dave and I have posted a number of them now on the blog knowing that you will probably appreciate them as much as we do. Or at least we hope you do. The posts I have written thus far about this part of Paddington are obviously a trip into a past that pre-dates my tenancy there, but in my view, still feels so very familiar and nostalgic. Now, not having lived in the area for a few years, I feel more like an outsider looking in with an abstract knowledge of a community I was once a part of. What I realise when I look at historical photographs, is just how temporary everything is, and how changeable. The only forever in these instances are images such as these frozen in time. Perhaps this is why we always find them so appealing. A record of a slither of time that we witness much as a fictional Time Lord in a Tardis would. Except we do it without having to travel very far.

 

Postscript

Thanks to Isabel for another fascinating post. I particularly like the panoramas she has created, something Selwyn himself used to do using the medium of sellotape. Once again, if anyone knows an easy way of adding an author in WordPress I’d be grateful.

I will spend my week off working on some new posts in an unhurried languid sort of way and return next week with some of the usual stuff.

Dave.

 

From the Penta Hotel: 1974

In this week’s post our roving surveyor Bernard Selwyn leaves his perch on the West London Air Terminal / Point West and crosses the Cromwell Road to take up a vantage point on one of the upper floors of the Penta Hotel which we saw last week. This was it in the days of the Air Terminal, not one of Selwyn’s pictures.

The 25-storey Penta was designed by Richard Seifert and partners and built in 1971-72. Although it looks vast and imposing it was actually smaller than the original design which would have included a bridge to the Terminal. The Architectural Review, in a piece called “Bad Dreams coming true”, called it “a terrifying interruption of the weave of this part of London” although the writer did admit that the large site meant it could sit out of alignment with the buildings next to it which caused less harm to the street layout. I love architectural language. “What the passer-by sees is an apparently chaotic pile forcing its way upwards through successive layers of low level impediments.”

Is that a Ford Capri in the foreground?

The hotel was subsequently called the London Forum and more recently the Holiday Inn. It still sits rather incongruously among the other buildings which line the Cromwell Road although in the passing years residents have grown used to it.

Selwyn got to one of the upper floors in 1974. I’ve made a selection from two films showing the views he got from up there.

I like the way part of his vantage point is visible in some of the pictures. It makes it easier to picture him leaning out of a window to take the pictures. As someone prone to vertigo (who has nevertheless been up many tall buildings) I get a hint of the danger / thrill of high places in some of these pictures. This particular view is not  terribly interesting but it does show the Gloucester Hotel (1972-73) which the Survey of London describes as “better-mannered” than the Penta. It certainly blends in with the skyline. Below you can see it next to Bailey’s Hotel which was built almost a hundred years earlier.

This view shows Gloucester Road and Cromwell Road looking east.

And there’s that white building I referred to last week. After writing last week’s post I was looking through the packets of photos and found a couple which would have answered my question immediately.

 

Here you see Gloucester Road Station laid bare, before it was built over in the 1990s. There are two trains, in different liveries,  stopped at the platforms. on the right a sparsely populated car park is is temporary use. Below you can see the outline of Lenthall Place.

The buildings are gone, and the former mews has become another parking area. The former bank on the corner of Gloucester Road has gone (see it in this post) and the remaining buildings are propped up with scaffolding. Can you see that irregularly shaped structure next to the trees? What was that used for, I wonder?

Selwyn turned towards central London.

The green domed tower of the Imperial Institute is a nearby landmark. The tall buildings further away are harder to make out. So look in the foreground at the surprising bulk of St Stephen’s Church.

In the next picture Selwyn pointed at the Natural History Museum but he also caught the V&A, the Brompton Oratory and in the distance you can make out Big Ben and St Paul’s.

And then there’s this 1960s  building, relatively recent in 1974.

Still called the Post Office Tower at this time, and still a bit of a wonder against the relatively subdued north London skyline.

This was a much more familiar landmark.

The picture shows how impressive the Albert Hall must have been when in dominated the landscape around it. You can see the Gothic spires of the Albert Memorial rising above the trees of Kensington Gardens.

Selwyn must have moved to a different vantage point for this view westwards.

The unmistakeable Earls Court Exhibition Centre and beyond it the Empress State Building on Lillie Road, a significant local landmark.

Continuing the movement round, we’re now looking south west.

The gasometers are south of the New King’s Road. You can also see the back of one of the stands at Chelsea Football Club, and below it the trees of Brompton Cemetery, the dome of the chapel just about visible. The cemetery grounds are also visible here

The church, after some puzzling, I think is St Luke’s Redcliffe Square.

Now this church is St Mary the Boltons, but there are two cathedrals of power generation in the background, Lots Road, showing one of its chimneys, and Fulham with four of them in line.

Finally, a look down from where Selwyn was standing to see some smaller but still impressive chimney stacks surrounded by trees.

Postscript

I must have set some sort of record for the number of links to other posts here, but like a virtual Selwyn I’ve covered a lot of ground since starting this blog. There are going to be another couple of posts based on his pictures coming up soon, but neither of them covering as wide an area.