Whitechapel Gallery
The Whitechapel Gallery is a public art gallery in Aldgate.

It was designed by Charles Harrison Townsend and opened in 1901. It was one of the first publicly-funded galleries in London. The work of contemporary artists is featured alongside retrospective exhibitions and shows of interest to the local community. The Whitechapel Gallery played an important part in the history of post-war British art. Initiated by members of the Independent Group, the gallery brought Pop Art to the attention of the general public as well as introducing some of the artists, concepts, designers and photographers that would define the Swinging Sixties. By the late 1970s, the preeminence of the Whitechapel Gallery was being threatened by newer venues such as the Hayward Gallery. The Whitechapel Gallery had a major refurbishment in 1986 and completed, in April 2009, a two-year programme of work to incorporate the former Passmore Edwards Library building next door. This has doubled the physical size of the Gallery and nearly tripled the available exhibition space, and now allows the Whitechapel Gallery to remain open to the public year round. The Whitechapel Gallery exhibited Pablo Picasso’s Guernica in 1938 as part of a touring exhibition organised by Roland Penrose to protest against the Spanish Civil War.

TUM Book Club: Tube Mapper Project
Photographer Luke Agbaimoni created the Tube Mapper project allowing him to be creative, fitting photography around his lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute.

The Underground is the backbone of the city of London, a part of our identity. It’s a network of shared experiences and visual memories, and most Londoners and visitors to the city will at some point have an interaction with the London Underground tube and train network. Photographer Luke Agbaimoni gave up city-scape night photography after the birth of his first child, but creating the Tube Mapper project allowed him to continue being creative, fitting photography around his new lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute. His memorable photographs consider such themes as symmetry, reflections, tunnels and escalators, as well as simply pointing out and appreciating the way the light falls on a platform in an evening sunset. This book reveals the London every commuter knows in a unique, vibrant and arresting style.

Fox Hill, Upper Norwood by Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) Camille Pissarro was born in St Thomas (then a Danish possession) in the West Indies but lived and worked mainly in the Paris area. He was an Impressionist and mainly painted landscapes. He visited London in 1870-71 and painted London views.

National Gallery, London

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A simulated flight into LCY courtesy of Google Earth Studio.

Edgware bus station
Edgware Bus Station lies behind Edgware train station.

In August 2009, writer Tanya Gold attempted to be the writer in residence at the bus station emulating Alain de Botton who had a similar position at Heathrow Airport.

TUM Book Club: Old Covent Garden
The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Clive Boursnell, then a young photographer, shot thousands of photographs of the old Covent Garden, documenting the end of an era before the markets moved out of central London. Boursnell captured these last days of the market over a period of six years, from 1968 until the market’s closure, in a series of beautiful portraits of the feisty life of a city institution.

Reflections on the Thames, Westminster, London (1880) John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836–1893) was an English Victorian-era artist best known for his nocturnal scenes of urban landscapes. Today, he is considered one of the great painters of the Victorian era.

John Atkinson Grimshaw

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Chartist meeting, Kennington Common (1848)
On 10 April 1848, William Kilburn took daguerrotypes of the Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common – taken from the top of The Horns tavern were the first ever photos of a crowd scene.

William Kilburn opened his portrait studio on London’s Regent Street in 1846. He was commissioned to make daguerreotype portraits of the Royal Family between 1846 and 1852 as the Royal Photographer, and was awarded a prize medal for his photographs at the 1851 Great Exhibition. The Chartists who took their name from Magna Carta were the first British national working class movement. Their meetings had a carnival-like atmosphere. Tensions were high on that April morning – there were those who feared that civil strife would break out. Between 6-10 April, extra troops were brought to the capital and the authorities enlisted 170 000 special constables. However, on 10th, instead of the half million expected, only about twenty to thirty thousand Chartists demonstrated, and there was little violence.

TUM Book Club: Tube Mapper Project
Photographer Luke Agbaimoni created the Tube Mapper project allowing him to be creative, fitting photography around his lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute.

The Underground is the backbone of the city of London, a part of our identity. It’s a network of shared experiences and visual memories, and most Londoners and visitors to the city will at some point have an interaction with the London Underground tube and train network. Photographer Luke Agbaimoni gave up city-scape night photography after the birth of his first child, but creating the Tube Mapper project allowed him to continue being creative, fitting photography around his new lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute. His memorable photographs consider such themes as symmetry, reflections, tunnels and escalators, as well as simply pointing out and appreciating the way the light falls on a platform in an evening sunset. This book reveals the London every commuter knows in a unique, vibrant and arresting style.

“London Bridge from the Old Swan” by the Irish painter Hubert Pugh (1780) Shooting the tidal rapids at old London Bridge was dangerous; many passengers preferred to get off at the Old Swan, and walk. Immediately across the river in the painting is St Saviour’s Church, now Southwark Cathedral.

Hubert Pugh (Bank of England Museum)

Video: Co-ordinate near to Gardner Close, Wanstead
Jago Hazzard went to the far reaches of the Central Line

Ravenscourt Park
Ravenscourt Park is a public park and garden located in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham.

The origins of Ravenscourt Park lie in the medieval manor and estate of Palingswick Manor on this site and first recorded in the 12th century. In the 13th century, the manor house was surrounded by a moat fed by the Stamford Brook, and the lake in the centre of the park is a remnant of that original moat. The house was rebuilt in 1650 and in 1747 it was sold to Thomas Corbett who named it Ravenscourt, probably derived from the raven in his coat of arms, which was itself a pun on his name since ’corbeau’ is French for raven. In 1812 the Ravenscourt estate was bought by George Scott, a builder/philanthropist who developed nearby St Peter’s Square. Scott employed landscaper Humphry Repton to lay out the gardens of the estate and encouraged the building of houses along its edges. Ravenscourt House was demolished after severe damage by incendiary bombs in 1941. The surviving former stable block now houses the park’s café. In 1887, the Scott family sold the whole estate to a developer. However, the ground leases of the row of detached and semi-detached residences called Ravenscourt Park, extending southwards from No. 23, contained a proviso giving ground-tenants the right to forbid any building on the width of the park opposite their frontages. Two of the tenants, Ebenezer Stanley Burchett and Frank Dethbridge determined to block any development by demanding sums of £1000 each. Other lessees then demanded similar sums. The developer agreed to sell the land for the greatly reduced sum of £58,000 and it was acquired by the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1887. The Board of Works established a public park, laid out by J. J. Sexby in the 32 acres of land surrounding the House, as which was opened on 19 May 1888.

TUM Book Club: Old Covent Garden
The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Clive Boursnell, then a young photographer, shot thousands of photographs of the old Covent Garden, documenting the end of an era before the markets moved out of central London. Boursnell captured these last days of the market over a period of six years, from 1968 until the market’s closure, in a series of beautiful portraits of the feisty life of a city institution.

Finborough Road, Chelsea

Nancy Weir Huntly (1890-1963)

Video: Flying into LCY
A simulated flight into LCY courtesy of Google Earth Studio.

Westbourne Lodge
Westbourne Lodge appeared in one of the earliest photographs in London.

Westbourne Lodge was built before the Great Western Railway was built but once it had, the railway ran beside the Lodge. The accompanying photo dates from 6 August 1857 and shows guests at the wedding of the Reverend Frederick Manners Stopford to Florence Augusta Saunders, daughter of Charles Saunders, first general secretary of the Great Western Railway. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was amongst the guests. During the wedding, both Brunel and Saunders were able to experience trains running beside the wedding party along the railway which they had built.

TUM Book Club: Tube Mapper Project
Photographer Luke Agbaimoni created the Tube Mapper project allowing him to be creative, fitting photography around his lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute.

The Underground is the backbone of the city of London, a part of our identity. It’s a network of shared experiences and visual memories, and most Londoners and visitors to the city will at some point have an interaction with the London Underground tube and train network. Photographer Luke Agbaimoni gave up city-scape night photography after the birth of his first child, but creating the Tube Mapper project allowed him to continue being creative, fitting photography around his new lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute. His memorable photographs consider such themes as symmetry, reflections, tunnels and escalators, as well as simply pointing out and appreciating the way the light falls on a platform in an evening sunset. This book reveals the London every commuter knows in a unique, vibrant and arresting style.

London Omnibus (1914) Chevalier Fortunino Matania (1881–1963) was an Italian artist noted for his realistic portrayal of First World War trench warfare and of a wide range of historical subjects.

Fortunino Matani

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Frognal Bridge
Where Frognal meets the Finchley Road, there is an indiscernible dip…

The road called Frognal follows the course of a long-buried river, the Kilbourne. Downstream this becomes the Westbourne, one of the major “lost” rivers of London.

TUM Book Club: Tube Mapper Project
Photographer Luke Agbaimoni created the Tube Mapper project allowing him to be creative, fitting photography around his lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute.

The Underground is the backbone of the city of London, a part of our identity. It’s a network of shared experiences and visual memories, and most Londoners and visitors to the city will at some point have an interaction with the London Underground tube and train network. Photographer Luke Agbaimoni gave up city-scape night photography after the birth of his first child, but creating the Tube Mapper project allowed him to continue being creative, fitting photography around his new lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute. His memorable photographs consider such themes as symmetry, reflections, tunnels and escalators, as well as simply pointing out and appreciating the way the light falls on a platform in an evening sunset. This book reveals the London every commuter knows in a unique, vibrant and arresting style.

The Surrey Canal, Camberwell (1935) Algernon Newton began to exhibit regularly at the Royal Academy summer shows in 1923 and he continued to send paintings for several decades. His chosen subjects were views of London, mostly in the St John’s Wood, Hampstead, Kentish Town and Paddington areas. He was particularly fond of including a stretch of water in his compositions and often chose back-street views of canals, as here. He liked the slightly forlorn Regency and early Victorian terraces that faced the canals, and gave them a curiously uninhabited look. He once wrote: ’There is beauty to be found in everything, you only have to search for it; a gasometer can make as beautiful a picture as a palace on the Grand Canal, Venice. It simply depends on the artist’s vision.’

Algernon Newton (1880–1968)/Tate Collection

Video: Co-ordinate near to Gardner Close, Wanstead
Jago Hazzard went to the far reaches of the Central Line

River Westbourne
The easternmost branch of the River Westbourne rises just south of the centre of Hampstead,

There is another branch which rises at Whitestone Pond, Hampstead Heath which flows approximately southward. It meets this eastern branch in Kilburn – to skirt east of Hyde Park’s Serpentine lake after about 3.3 miles, to Sloane Square, Chelsea after about 1 mile, passes centrally under the south side of Royal Hospital Chelsea’s Ranelagh Gardens after about half a mile, then issues into the Inner London Tideway. In common with several urbanised streams, its basin contributes to a network of storm drainage channels, with a sewer beneath its route. The river was originally called the Kilburn (Cye Bourne – royal stream, ’Bourne’ being an Anglo-Saxon word for ’river’) but has been known, at different times and in different places, as Kelebourne, Kilburn, Bayswater, Bayswater River, Bayswater Rivulet, Serpentine River, The Bourne, Westburn Brook, the Ranelagh River, and the Ranelagh Sewer. It is of similar size to the Fleet. The waters of the Westbourne were originally pure and in 1437 and 1439 conduits were laid to carry water from the Westbourne into the City of London, for drinking. In the nineteenth century, however, the water became filthy and impure by its use as a sewer, and the rise of the water closet as the prevailing form of sanitation. When Belgravia, Chelsea and Paddington were developed, it became necessary to drive the river Westbourne underground to build over it. The river was therefore directed into pipes in the early part of the nineteenth century, work which was completed in the 1850s. Since then, the Westbourne has been one of the lost rivers of London, running underground in a pipe. The pipe can still be seen running above the platform of Sloane Square tube station. It is located just below the ceiling towards the end of the platforms closest to the exits. The pipe is the original one constructed in the nineteenth century. Although the station was badly bombed during the Battle of Britain in November 1940, the old iron pipe was not damaged. A vestige of the river, a wide quay opens into the river Thames about 300 yards west of Chelsea Bridge. An overflow outfall, from a pipe named the Ranelagh Sewer, can still be seen at low tide, as most of the Westbourne’s course has been used as a convenient depression in the land to place the local sewerage system, some of which takes surface water to form a combined sewer which links to two intercept sewers, the Middle Level Sewer and the Northern Low Level Sewer in the London sewerage system.

TUM Book Club: Old Covent Garden
The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Clive Boursnell, then a young photographer, shot thousands of photographs of the old Covent Garden, documenting the end of an era before the markets moved out of central London. Boursnell captured these last days of the market over a period of six years, from 1968 until the market’s closure, in a series of beautiful portraits of the feisty life of a city institution.

Wapping, 1860-1864

James McNeill Whistler

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A simulated flight into LCY courtesy of Google Earth Studio.

Two streams meet
Somewhere beneath the basement of 16 Frognal, NW3 two tributaries of the River Westbourne meet.

The road called ’Frognal’ follows the route of one of main branches of the River Westbourne – this branch being called the ’Kilbourne’. Downstream it will flow through Kilburn, Bayswater and Knightsbridge – giving each of those places, indirectly, their names. But up here in the hills of Hampstead, the infant river flows beneath modern residents of 19th century houses. Below the house with the address of 16 Frognal, the lay the junction where the main Kilbourne stream, flowing downhill beside Frognal, met a smaller tributary which began in a boggy area beneath the future Netherhall Gardens. This can be seen on the 1870 map where the marker shows the spot. Further along its course, the Kilbourne will meet the Cannon Stream flowing down from Whitestone Pond and, combined, form the Westbourne.

TUM Book Club: Tube Mapper Project
Photographer Luke Agbaimoni created the Tube Mapper project allowing him to be creative, fitting photography around his lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute.

The Underground is the backbone of the city of London, a part of our identity. It’s a network of shared experiences and visual memories, and most Londoners and visitors to the city will at some point have an interaction with the London Underground tube and train network. Photographer Luke Agbaimoni gave up city-scape night photography after the birth of his first child, but creating the Tube Mapper project allowed him to continue being creative, fitting photography around his new lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute. His memorable photographs consider such themes as symmetry, reflections, tunnels and escalators, as well as simply pointing out and appreciating the way the light falls on a platform in an evening sunset. This book reveals the London every commuter knows in a unique, vibrant and arresting style.

Orleston Rd, N7 (1933)

Elwin Hawthorne

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Barnet Grass Speedway
Barnet Grass Speedway was active between 1929 and 1936, next to the recently constructed Barnet By Pass.

It was the North London Motor Club that negotiated to run speedway on a twenty acre grass track that was adjacent to the Barnet Bypass. It was thus so convenient to travel to with plenty of room for spectators and their transport. The track was originally grass-covered rather than the more usual cinder or shale. The track was opened for the first meeting on the 27 July 1929. The site remained the venue for open meeting through to 1936 although by 1934 the grass was all but worn away and cinders were added to the bends. The name for its final year was changed to simply ’Barnet Speedway’. Closing in 1937 when the North London Motor Club failed to achieve an extension on the licence after having successfully completed eighty seven meeting meaning that speedway was lost to the area however the NLMC moved their speedway operation to High Beech leaving the owners of the land free to sell it on for building. Once the circuit had been sold off, Saffron Green Junior School was built directly over the site in the 1950s.

TUM Book Club: Tube Mapper Project
Photographer Luke Agbaimoni created the Tube Mapper project allowing him to be creative, fitting photography around his lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute.

The Underground is the backbone of the city of London, a part of our identity. It’s a network of shared experiences and visual memories, and most Londoners and visitors to the city will at some point have an interaction with the London Underground tube and train network. Photographer Luke Agbaimoni gave up city-scape night photography after the birth of his first child, but creating the Tube Mapper project allowed him to continue being creative, fitting photography around his new lifestyle and adding stations on his daily commute. His memorable photographs consider such themes as symmetry, reflections, tunnels and escalators, as well as simply pointing out and appreciating the way the light falls on a platform in an evening sunset. This book reveals the London every commuter knows in a unique, vibrant and arresting style.

“Little Italy, Clerkenwell” (1932) When exhibited by the East London Group in 2023, this was the first time that this painting had been seen in public since the Second World War twitter.com/EastLndonGroup

Harold Steggles

Video: Flying into LCY
A simulated flight into LCY courtesy of Google Earth Studio.

Barham House
Barham (Boreham) House was once one of the most prominent properties in Elstree.

There had been a house on the site since circa 1600 which had changed occupants many times and was renamed over the years. Francis Burton M.D. (died 1828), uncle of Richard Francis Burton, military surgeon who made Napoleon’s Death Mask, lived at Barham House, and is buried in Elstree parish church. The final owner, the famous publisher Andrew Chatto, was there by 1897. His son sold the property to a local estate agency which demolished it.

TUM Book Club: Old Covent Garden
The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Clive Boursnell, then a young photographer, shot thousands of photographs of the old Covent Garden, documenting the end of an era before the markets moved out of central London. Boursnell captured these last days of the market over a period of six years, from 1968 until the market’s closure, in a series of beautiful portraits of the feisty life of a city institution.

“Bridge in London” (1908) Mstislav Valerianovich Dobuzhinsky or Dobužinskis (1875-1957) was a Lithuanian/Russian artist noted for his cityscapes conveying the explosive growth and decay of the early twentieth-century city.

Mstislav Dobuzhinsky

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