Tag: Photography

Saving Covent Garden

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 28th December 2017

Covent Garden Market in London has a varied history that came to a head in the 1960s. Traffic to and from the market for buyers and traders was bothersome enough with narrow horse carts but with larger cars and lorries it was a nightmare.

In 1961 the Covent Garden Market Bill was passed, there was some deliberation on what would happen to the historic buildings of Covent Garden after that. Redevelopment plans arose, and for ten years these plans were fiercely fought by the Covent Garden community, arguing in favour of preserving the area for its historical value and cultural meaning.

The Elephant being the GLC for Greater London Council, trampling on the area.

Their victory in this battle preserved Covent Garden’s old market buildings and they were reopened as a major tourist and shopping destination in 1980. The market had to be moved in its entirety across the river to Nine Elms in 1974 but the original buildings were preserved. Below are the responses to the closure and artistic propaganda by David Gentleman to show the beauty of the area.

By the end of the 1960s, traffic congestion had reached such a level that the use of the square as a modern wholesale distribution market was becoming untenable, and significant redevelopment was planned. Following a public outcry, buildings around the square were protected in 1973, preventing redevelopment. The following year the market moved to a new site in south-west London. The square languished until its central building re-opened as a shopping centre in 1980.

Goodbye Covent Garden was a photobook published in 1975 by Oxford Illustrated Press. It featured photographs of the workers and people around Covent Garden taken by Ena Bodin in the last two years of the market. Other than the cars and beautiful signage in the photographs you can see some of the mens fashions and even in some cases – platform shoes.

Above the picture shows the original Market building in use and below you can see the beautiful lithographs by David Gentleman.

David Gentleman – Foreign Fruit Market, 1972

David Gentleman – Southern Section of Piazza (James Butler), 1972

David Gentleman – East Terrace, 1972

David Gentleman – Ellen Keeley’s Shop, 1972

The main premises of barrow-making firm of Ellen Keeley est. in Ireland in 1830. The Keeley family came to England at the time of the potato famine and lived in Nottingham Court. James Keeley invented and produced the costermonger’s barrow, like a shop on wheels and also developed the donkey barrow, once a familiar sight in London. In 1891 he was living at No.12 Nottingham Court and the elderly costermonger Ellen was living alone at No.8. In the 1960s the firm branched out into hiring their vehicles to the film industry (Keeley Hire in Hoddesdon).

Ellen Keeley’s Shop, 33 Neals Street, 2017.

David Gentleman – Warehouses between Shelton St and Earlham St, 1972

David Gentleman – Piazza Looking South Past St Paul’s, 1972

David Gentleman – Warehouse in Mercer St, 1972

David Gentleman – The Flower Market, Covent Garden, 1972

The photography in this post is more of a defeat than a triumph, it is the documenting the end of something. The works of David Gentleman however placed along-side these photos show that Gentleman’s lithographs were able to inspire a vision of the area, making the dishevelled and shabby, romantic. Much like an Eric Ravilious painting. In making the lithographs I believe that Gentleman helped to present a case for the areas protection amongst the artists and lovers of conservation at the time when a spotlight was being put on the East End and Spitalfields.

Tags covent garden, David Gentleman, lithography, London, Photography

A Walk in the Woods.

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 7th December 2017

On a bit of a dull weather day I took my camera with me as I went for a walk in the woods, so here are some photos from my instagram feed.

Tags Photography

A Trip To Norfolk

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 17th August 2017

A short post with some of the photos I took on a trip to North Norfolk.

Tags norfolk, Photography

From Nudity to Raiment

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 10th August 2017

These pictures are all from a book by Hilaire Hiler ‘An Introduction To The Study Of Costume’, 1929.

The book illustrates fashion and costume through history. At just over 300 pages there are many wonderful illustrations, some of them I have pasted below.

Hilaire Harzberg Hiler was an American artist, psychologist, and color theoretician who worked in Europe and United States during the mid-20th century. At home and abroad, Hiler worked as a muralist, jazz musician, costume and set designer, teacher, and author.

Tags Books, Costume, Photography

London Dockland.

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 9th March 2017

This is a piece from Lilliput Magazine, 1946. I loved the photos and the history that goes with them. The photographs are by Bill Brandt.

Below Tower Bridge: St Pauls Seen From Bermondsey.
As ships steam up the Thames towards Kings Reach, Tower Bridge looms up ahead of them.Off Shadwell, a mile below, they signal Cherry Garden Pier at Southwark; Cherry Garden telephones to the bridge master, and the great bascules rise to admit them to the heart of London. Above, the traffic waits, but only for ninety seconds: the bridge begins to close before the ships stern is clear. Tower Bridge was built in 1894 at a cost of one and a half million pounds. Beyond the bridge is the dome of St Pauls.

As I Was A-Walking Down Nightingale Lane…
Nightingale Lane would send any rustic bird flying in terror for its life. A brutally uncompromising dockyard street, it wanders grimly between the Customs walls of St. Katharines and London Docks down to Wapplng High Street. But in the 17th century it was a simple country lane. It is recorded that Charles I hunted a stag from Wanstead and that the hill was made in a garden in this lane, to the detriment of the herbs in the garden. The name is actually derived from the knights whom Edgar I allowed to form a guild here it was first called Cnihten, and then Knighten, Guild.

Wareshouses Along The South Bank.
Londons merchant princes may dress in black striped trousers and call themselves limited companies,but the goods they import are more rich and strange than any ever seen in Baghdad. Behind the walls of these drab warehouses lie spices and precious metals; tusks of ivory, furs, and casks of wine. The very grimness of the port is attractive to the visitor. If William Dunbar could return from the 15th century; he might well write again:
“Of merchants full of substance and of might, London, thou art the flower of cities all.”

Shad Thames.
Along the river from St. Saviours Back to Tower Bridge winds a street which, with its bewildering mass of gantries and cranes, and its highly compressed activity, is typical of much of the Thames-side London which has been building up slowly from the time of Drake. Before our great Elizabethan sailors opened the ocean highways, there was a mere trickle of foreign shipping in the Thamesa trickle that was to swell to the greatest flood of shipping in the world. Shad is another name for herring, and as Shad Thames is a continuation of Pickle Herring Street, the name is perhaps not so,obscure as it first appears.

Hermitage Stairs, Wapping.
It is no longer thought that the Romans built the first river wall, but it was already old when it collapsed in 1324 and the river streamed through to flood 100,000 acres of the land now occupied by the London and the St. Katharines docks. After the breach had been repaired people were encouraged to return to Wapping wall and settle, so that there might be someone with a personal interest in keeping the wall in repair. It was around this time that the hermitage is thought to have existed which gave Hermitage Lane its name. Waterman call the river here not the Thames, but the London river.

Horselydown New Stairs, Bermondsey.
The palace, the monastery, and the Abbey that were in their turn the pride of Bermondsey are to-day not even memories. Just below the bridge on the Bermondsey side of the river, Horselydown Lane runs down to the water overground where formerly the houses of great nobles and prelates stood. Here also were the parish archery butts, set up in the reign of Henry VIII. The warehouses lining the dark alleys are not very old, but they have stood long enough to seem immutable, and to provide a dark challenge to town planners.

Charles Browns, Limehouse.
Many of the old East End pubs have a rich historical background, real or synthetic,of piracy, smuggling, and general villainy. Charley Browns is the most famous of the old seafaring taverns, and still the first port of call for most sightseers in the East End. Sailors front all over the world used to bring their trophies to Charley, until the King of Limehouse, as he came to be called, had filled his pub with curios. When Charley died in 1932 ten thousand mourners followed his coffin: The pub is still a sailors, as well as a tourists,house.

Wapping The Wharves.
Today Wapping is less exciting, and much more respectable, than it ever was in the past, when Ratcliffe Highway was the home of the land-shark and the downfall of the sailor. The Carron Wharf, on the right, belongs to a company which in the 18th century invented the carronade, a piece of ordnance which their ships mounted by Government licence. To prevent being mistaken for privateers these ships also carried the likeness of a cannon ball on their masts. This is the view across the river from St. Saviour’s Dock.

Tags bill brandt, Lilliput Magazine, London, Photography, wharf

Canal Tripping

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 12th January 2017

One of the best books I read in 2016 was Emma Smith’s Maidens’ Trip, a story about life on the wartime canals. In 1943 Emma Smith joined the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company under their wartime scheme of employing women to replace the boaters.

The Canal system had been in some decline since the rise of the railways in the 1880s, but wartime efforts to save money on fuel and get maximum efficiency out of the countries infrastructure facilitated a temporary change.

The Re-issued cover of the book.

Smith set out with two friends on a big adventure: three eighteen-year-olds, freed from a middle-class background, precipitated into the boating fraternity. They learn how to handle a pair of seventy-two foot-long canal boats, how to carry a cargo of steel north from London to Birmingham and coal from Coventry; how to splice ropes, bail out bilge water, keep the engine ticking over and steer through tunnels. They live off kedgeree and fried bread and jam, adopt a kitten, lose their bicycles, laugh and quarrel and get progressively dirtier and tougher as the weeks go by. I was rather annoyed to have missed the BBC Radio4 adaptation of it but hope to see it on BBC Radio4Extra in the coming year.

While reading the Smith book, for reference I had the ‘The Canals of England’ by Eric de Maré with his beautiful photos of 1950s Britain. Below are a selection of the pictures.

By the end of the nineteen-sixties a lot of the canals where in poor condition and it was only until the mid nineteen-nineties that they were cleared out and seen as tourist attractions.

Eric de Maré – The Canals of England, The Architectural Press, 1950
Emma Smith – Maidens’ Trip, Putnam & Company, 1948

Tags Canals, Emma Smith, Eric de Maré, Maidens Trip, Photography

Frost and Fog in Cambridge

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 29th December 2016

Tags Cambridge, Madingley, Photography

Ypres Tourism

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 27th November 2016

These pictures are from the ‘Michelin Guides to the Battle-Fields: Ypres and The Battles for Ypres’. It was a book giving the history of the first world war with maps and how each area was affected over time. I think most importantly they have pictures of the Ypres area during and directly after the war showing the carnage and the ruins, both with ruined machinery and buildings.

A difficult crossing. British and Belgian soldiers.

Today I think it might be easy to think a guide like this is distasteful, but there was a real demand of people who wanted to see where they lost family members and after the carnage the booklet is to the point with it’s histories.

Langemarck, with destroyed tank. The mound in the middle distance is all that remains of the church.

The British Cemetery Just outside of Ypres, on the road to Menin.

British Cemetery on the Polegsteert Road at Messines.

British Cemetery at the Hospice Notre-Dame.

The graveyards of the dead were rows of graves with wooden crosses staked in the ground while designs and ideas for war monuments were being designed. After the monuments had been designed and the graves laid out with stone uniformed crosses the families were asked if they would like to purchase the original wooden crosses and have it shipped back, those that where not bought by families were burnt.

The Flanders Battlefield in Winter.

The slopes of Scherpenberg Hill.

French troops passing in front of the ruins of Ypres Cloth Hall.

Messines Road.

Destroyed British Tank sunk in the mud at the entrance to Poelcappelle.

Before: Biebuyge House and below after the war.

After.

British Defence-works in front of Ypres.

On the back pages of the book is a page outlining what Michelin did in the War by converting their warehouses (four storey) into hospitals with Operating Theatres, X-Ray wards and Laboratory’s in seven weeks and opening on September 22nd 1914. All the expenses were paid by the Michelin company.

A view of one of the Michelin Wards.

An advert for photographic reproductions of the images in the book, most of them were provided by the Imperial War Museum, London.

Tags Photography, War Art, War Memorial, WW1, WWI, Ypres

My Photos of Various Locations

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 17th September 2016

Saffron Walden

Lavenham

Hildersham

Littlebury

Knapwell

Diss

Knapwell

Cambridge

Hoxne

St Ives, Cambridgeshire

Cambridge

Islington

Cambridge

Hackney

Babingley

Madingley

Saffron Walden

Tags Photography

The Other Photos of Paul Nash

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 5th September 2016

In the Archives of the Tate are over a thousand photographs taken by Paul Nash that were donated by the Paul Nash Trust in 1970. Many of the photographs by Nash where studies for paintings but on their own they are surreal marvels. Mostly taken during the 1930s and 40s, the photos sometimes have no date and a guessed idea of the location.

Below are my favourite out of all of the pictures processed, I chose 17 in all. A good deal of them have not been editioned in books or as prints. I have tried to order them in a way I think looks pleasing.

The text I have taken from the large Fischer Fine Art folio of 25 prints by Paul Nash in 1978, in the 25 photographs John Piper picked out, it’s curious how I have selected none of the same images. I have included it as it’s the best and most brief summery of Nash’s talents, and it’s always nice to hear from John Piper.

Paul Nash took photographs for the last sixteen years of his life; that is to say, from 1930 when he was given an American Kodak. The camera was adequate to his purpose and he never became involved enough in the technique of photography to buy himself a more elaborate one or bother with wide-angle or other lenses or even to use a tripod. But his snapshots were neither indiscriminate nor trigger-happy.

As in everything, he was as professional as he needed to be. If he wanted to take something and the sun was not out, he would wait for it; if he wanted a shadow at a certain angle, he would wait for it. He would stalk the Uffington White Horse or Maiden Castle or the stones at Avebury until the place and the light were right and his friends who drove him would have to wait and stalk too. It was often anxious for them and difficult for him since he was seldom well and that kind of effort and concentration was exhausting.

Paul had an economical and obsessive eye and his new toy at once became a valuable weapon. The very first photographs that he took on the way to the United States related to the preoccupations of his painting; a ship’s mast and rigging was a slender echo and anticipation of the open cage structure he often used, the complicated interplay of hard edges and hollowed shadows within the curve of a life-boat proclaimed his interest in the mystery of ordinary things seen from unordinary angles.

No one could have been a less doctrinaire or literary surrealist but he had a punning vision which, with his aptitude for analogue, made his instinctive reaction to the world very close to the more self-conscious and sophisticated surrealist one. His wit with the camera was a natural extension of the wittiness of his words and of his attitude to life. He loved to see the funny side of things without being destructive so the objects that he photographed at Swanage, for example, for his article “Seaside Surrealism” – absurd concrete seats, huge pretentious lamp standards, three concrete steps isolated in a bed of pebbles – all have a double life of incongruity and of beauty.

While on the one hand he used his photographs as immediate aides-memoire to pin down a fleeting glimpse of the famous “Genus Loci” or to record the particular lie of a dead tree or a shadow on a wall, on the other hand he recorded aspects of the countryside that he was never tempted to paint directly but whichhe translated into the magic of his painting. Stone upon stone in miles of dry stone wall, the endless meeting and parting of furrows in an enormous field, layers of cork drying, stacked and roofed like rows of stone fishing huts, the invisible but eloquent bones of a landscape under stretches of featureless grass, all these ancient repetitions, natural or man-made, extend the more immediate subjects of his work and give them their timeless quality.

Paul Nash always had a feeling for the horizontal, at once boundless and embracing, and this is especially noticeable in his photographs. His Kodak, whether by chance or intention, took an exceptionally wide picture. But he always expected things to work for him and they usually did.

– John Piper. 1977.