The London Daily Newsletter Monday 31 July

Corner of Rackham Street, Ladbroke Grove (1950)
The bombing of the Second World War meant that some whole streets were wiped off the future map. Rackham Street, in London W10, was one of them.

On the left (south) side of the street, a local tradesmen’s trolley can be seen – possibly a knife sharpener. However, a clue to the empty streets can perhaps be seen further down the street. A huge gap in the houses shows the bomb damage from 1940, some ten years before. The photographer of these shots toured streets, perhaps knowing the fate of the area. The view would be utterly transformed by subsequent redevelopment in the early 1950s.

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.

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

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