The London Daily Newsletter Friday 4 August

Wedlake Street Baths
In a time when most had somewhere to live but few had somewhere to wash at home, public baths were the place to go…

Baths and a laundry to serve Queen’s Park had been built in 1898, where the boundary with Kensington ran slightly south of the canal along Wedlake Street to Kensal Road. They were built next to Halfpenny (Ha’penny) Steps which allowed access across the canal from the Harrow Road to the baths for people from the Queen’s Park Estate. Wedlake Street Baths housed both a swimming pool and public baths. Families would go there for their weekly bath. There was a distinct system in place to use the facilities – you would get a numbered ticket and sat until your number was called. While you were in the bath, you could shout out to the attendent if you wanted more hot or cold water. The steel changing cubicles, a local remembered, were all made of steel – even the door. ’It felt like you were in stir!’, remembered one. Earlier times, people would leave their clothes unattended in the cubicle with the half door and a curtain on the top. Then it turned modern and they got the clothes basket and a number to pin on their costumes. Wedlake Baths were closed in 1980.

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.

Tube Rain (2015) John Duffin is a print maker and painter well-known for his striking prints focusing on great architecture, depictions of modern life in urban environments and city streets at different times of day.

John Duffin

Video: Oyster
Getting around London with Oyster