Skip to main content

Rare Views of London in the 1930s

Thames House
We all know (or hope) that flea markets will offer hidden treasures. And sometimes they just do.

A lucky find in Deptford market, a couple of years ago, has made me, for the grand old sum of £5, the happy owner of a photo album with some very interesting shots. Although there are virtually no annotations in the album, it seems that the pictures were taken between 1930 and the late 1940's. Some may even be earlier.

Most the pictures are of groups of young people involved in camps and excursions organised by the Crusaders Union but some show views of the Queen Mary and sailing boats, of Stratford Upon Avon and other unnamed places, and of steam trains. Those about London - there are only seven of them recognisably of London itself - can be viewed in the Londonist gallery dedicated to them here.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Short History of the Elephant and Castle and Its Name

Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at...

Welcome to Towleroad Readers

On Wednesday, Towleroad , the top gay blog, who win all the awards, were kind enough to link to and quote from my post on Football and Homophobia . This has generated quite a bit a traffic in this otherwise desolate region of the blogosphere. So much so that Wednesday was my highest day ever with 132 hits (previous one was 97), this week is already my highest ever with 317 hits so far (previous one was 287) and this month is the highest month ever with already 865 hits (previous one, last month, was 739, thanks to the posts on the Danish cartoons). So thank you again to Towleroad and welcome to their readers. I hope they like what they see and will be back from time to time.

As Grace

Another picture reconstruction. This time the victim is Grace Jones and her picture by Jean Paul Goude (explained here ) which was used for the cover of her 1985 compilation album, Island Life . Unlike Ms Jones, though, this is all me posing. No reconstruction other than adding the original background and props in Photoshop. See the making-of picture of my version here . Below is another, more elaborate reconstruction of the pic done with the help of photographers Jasmin Teer (photography) and Dan Bosworth (Photoshop) in July 2009. This pic was "The Awesome" in The Goude, The Bad and The Awesome (March 2010).