1975: Books And More Books, 39 London Road. © Bruce Rae
If not exactly a local exhibition for local people, this collection of photographs of one London street, recorded variously in 1904, 1975 and 1919 is certainly a show about local people and community. London College of Communications, the site of the exhibition, lies on the Elephant and Castle gyratory system and one could almost throw a roll of film the distance from the college entrance to London Road, where the images were taken.
Ah, good old Elephant. Almost the first part of London I encountered as a callow student in the mid-1980’s, it was immediately obvious that this was a slice of the capital a world away from the glitzy west end just a couple of miles down the road – a dismal, dilapidated shopping centre situated on a fume-filled roundabout. Aside from a bizarrely out of place classical tabernacle, tower blocks, rodent-grey monoliths of brutalism, formed the grim backdrop.
1904: Untitled (London Road), Ernest Milner
1904: Untitled (London Road), Ernest Milner
London Road arrows off the roundabout towards Waterloo and the river. The earliest photographs here, from 1904, obviously long pre-dating the concrete agglomerations of the area (Kubrick considered setting part of A Clockwork Orange locally before opting for the Thamesmead estate), were taken by Ernest Milner, a surveyor who, without any apparent artistic intent, was recording the street as part of his work around the recently constructed Northern Line.
The images have a grave beauty of their own; though people are rarely present, there are signs everywhere of humanity bustling away quietly somewhere in the background. One almost ghostly figure, his back to the viewer, stands before L. Wirth’s Pork Butchers. Huge joints of meat in serried rows fill the window’s display while a small white terrier noses hopefully at the doorway. The shops’ hoardings, even more than the beautiful ornate Victorian lamps that hang from their frontages, emphasise the distance of this world from our own – Cassidy’s general food store selling ‘Pratt’s Patent Dog Cakes’, Palmer’s pie shop with its ‘Eel and Kidney Pies’ at 2D a pop.
1975: Ferraro & Sons, Ice Cream Parlour, 15-15A London Road, © Bruce Rae
1975: Fish Bar, 11 London Road, © Bruce Rae
1975: Mr L Rose, Newsagents, 6 London Road, © Bruce Rae
1975: Wright’s Traders’ Supplies, 43 London Road. © Bruce Rae
The 1975 photographs were taken by Bruce Rae, a lecturer at the college in the days when it was the London College of Printing. These, also black and white, while allowing fascinating comparison with the 1904 set, focus as much, if not more so, on the people who occupy the street, the shopkeepers and café-proprietors and their clientele.
Here there is a vivid sense of a bustling community – the pub, the cafes, the bookshop, their staff and customers standing before them, an unmistakable collective expression written across faces old and young, black and white that says: this is us, this is where we are from.
2019: Short Cuts Salon, 20 London Road, © Robin Christian
2019: HFC Chicken, 19 London Road, © Robin Christian
Finally, and by contrast, there are a few contemporary images of the street. These feel perfunctory, an add-on. A handful of photographs, in colour (why?) record some of the shops and fast-food restaurants that now feature. The message is, presumably, that epochs inevitably disappear and people die (and the memento mori aspect of this show is inescapable) but humanity and some form of community, however altered, continues.
This fascinating exhibition is worth a detour, but a word of warning – it is located in a small room on the second floor of the College; the delightful and helpful staff will point you in the right direction but be prepared for a wander down college corridors peering at door numbers.
