This will be a slightly different post in that I'm going to look at just one early photograph of London - taken in Notting Hill Gate.
This post was inspired by Dave Walker's excellent Library Time Machine blog from the library service of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Dave recently retired from his position, leaving a treasure trove of images and his analysis of those images.
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Many of his published blogs discussed ‘postcard London’.
One of the lost jobs of London was that of the speculative postcard photographer. With a truly excellent postal service around the turn of the twentieth century - items posted in the morning could often arrive with the recipient by the afternoon.
Postcards were all the rage. One could jot a quick note to a friend on the back of a postcard or write at length about a holiday. It was the email and WhatsApp of its day. The design of a postcard's front could add a little ‘oomph’ to the message, and postcards photographically depicting a locality were widely available at newsagents.
Many unidentified photographers were responsible for capturing images of every city, town, village and suburb. They were operating independently on the streets, driven by speculation and the ambition to sell their photographs to postcard publishers later. They predominantly worked during daylight hours when the streets were full of activity.
In this one example, we'll take a look at the full postcard and then zoom in on the action and catch a flavour of the individual lives of the people depicted.
Here is Notting Hill Gate looking west taken around 1904. This is the corner of Silver Street - then the name for the northern section of Kensington Church Street.
We are looking at a very busy scene.
On the southern side of the street - the left of the postcard - is Henry Hobson Finch's "Hoop Tavern". Looking down the street, immediately to the right of the bus, is the Central Line (then the Central London Railway) station at Notting Hill Gate on the corner of Pembridge Gardens. There is a triangular stone structure on its roof. This building would be demolished when the two Notting Hill Gate stations (the other being the ‘Metropolitan District/Circle line’ station) were combined underground.
We'll zoom in on features of the postcard.
Next to the Hoop Tavern, we see William J. Tame's fruiterer shop, with staff loading a delivery wagon, and Matthew Pittman's stationery store. A woman with a pram is on the corner of Silver Street.
Beside the delivery wagon, there’s a sad-looking girl. She seems to have spotted the camera, as has the boy. Most adults here are oblivious to it but one of the fruiterer’s workers has also spotted the photographer. Perhaps it is William Tame himself? We’ll never know.
An elderly gentleman with a cap is striding purposefully towards the corner. A sign cut off by the photograph indicates a gentlemens’ toilet in the vicinity.
Other signs in the postcard show some sort of fundraising target which resembles a large thermometer. The top scale reads ‘150’ so the object is not measuring Fahrenheit. This is next to a sign showing that the newsagent sells the Kelly’s Post Office Directory.
On the lamppost, we are told to “Keep To The Left”. With the advent of the motor vehicle, authorities are starting to impose traffic discipline. Horse traffic generally did keep to the left, but horses had a mind of their own and could ignore the rule sometimes. Not being able to read or understand English, this was understandable.
The woman with a pram is glancing at the shop display, having just passed a sign advertising “Paris Fashions”. She is possibly preparing to move the pram off the pavement and cross the road - the angle of the pram hints at this.
The details of clothing, such as the leg of mutton sleeves on the woman's dress, offer insights into the fashion of the early 1900s. Snug to the elbows, the sleeves then expand dramatically.
Let’s move our attention to the opposite side of the road. The northern side of the street features a man using a hooked pole to pull out a shop awning.
He is carefully placing his feet to avoid the horse droppings. In 1904, it was safer to step off of the pavement and into the road. Horse-drawn traffic moved at a stately pace.
There is an approaching woman. She is very fashionably dressed. Outside R.C. Weston’s poulterer, she walks towards the awning and is already past a barber who offers haircutting and shaving. They’ll also sell you ‘Ardath Smoking Mixture’.
There are horse-drawn carriages and a motor bus in the distance and, zooming in, we can see more detail of the Central London Railway (Central line) station building situated between the junctions of Notting Hill Gate with Pembridge Road and, in the foreground, Pembridge Gardens.
The early model motor bus has distinctive features, such as the starter arm and the low-slung engine block. Later omnibus models were higher off the ground for improved undercarriage protection and enhanced driver visibility.
The advert for Horlicks Malted Milk, first imported into the UK in 1890, adds an interesting layer of historical context to the scene.
The coexistence of horse-drawn and motor buses during that period highlights a transitional phase in transportation history.
We have looked at just one postcard. When we browse social media and are shown older photos which originated as postcards, it’s well worth taking a closer look.
I was going to leave this post at this point - I had come to a conclusion, and had phrased a well-honed closing remark. But I can’t help following up with one more postcard from the same blog post of Dave Walker…
This is a close up of the station. The Central London Railway was advertised as the “Twopenny Tube” and here’s the evidence of the 2d fare. This alliterate slogan gave the term tube to the capital.
There are people at the stop waiting for the horse bus. It looks pretty full. We’ve all been at bus stops when, disappointingly, a full bus arrives. There’s a woman walking briskly away from the scene, exuding the demeanour of a passenger who has just disembarked and is eager to resume her journey on foot. But enough already! Here’s a chance to analyse the photo for yourself.
On both the above maps, showing precisely the same view at the same scale, the golden star shows the position of the original postcard’s photographer looking down the street to the west (left). The earlier Ordnance Survey map dates from the 1890s and hence we are missing the Central line station on the corner of Pembridge Gardens - it arrived in 1900. The Hoop Tavern on the original postcard hides the entrance to the (Metropolitan District) Railway station, which we can spot on the map.
There is an accompanying video to this post. Before we get there, one last look at the original postcard from 1904 and the same shot from the same position, 120 years later.
Now, for that video….