In Memory of Philip 1950-2021

We are very sad to share with you that Philip died in February, having lived with cancer for some years. He became very ill in December and died at home with his family.

We plan to keep his website and archives accessible. Please bear with us as we work this out. For now, you can still use the contact form for enquiries.

Here are some recent links about Philip's life and work:

The Guardian - Other Lives

Huck Magazine - Photos Capturing the Soul of Notting Hill in the 70s

Cafe Royal Books - Notting Hill in the 1970s and Kings Cross 1989-90

Jane, Anna and Eva 

(Philip's partner and daughters)

Viral Rides

Like many others, I took to my bike for daily exercise when the lockdown began. I'd forgotten the pleasures of two wheels, and found the switch from walking to cycling made it easier to keep my distance from oblivious pedestrians with social distancing amnesia. But after a few days of aimless forays I got bored. I decided to take a camera with me, with the intention of bringing back at least one useable picture from every trip.

A bike is a wonderful thing. It gets you to places without hassle, at little cost and minimal planning. But bringing a camera along is very different from photographing on foot. If something catches your eye you have to stop, check the traffic, check for bicycle thieves, put the bike somewhere where it isn't going to trip up a pedestrian or get crushed by a bus, before you can even get the camera out of its bag.

So by the time you're in position, the bike is safe, and your camera set, the perfectly framed incident, or moment of light and shade, that you had spotted from the saddle has most likely been and gone.

But not always. I don't know what my collection of images does, or will, add up to once the pandemic has become a distant memory, if that ever happens, but the fruits of my cycle expeditions in and around North West London over the last few weeks are enough to keep me pedalling. More pictures here.

The Blitz Spirit

Maybe it's talk of 'The Blitz Spirit' reawakened by the coronvirus pandemic that has prompted me to see echos of wartime stiff upper lippery in the latest batch of scans from my archive.

In the mid 1970s memory of the Second World War was still strong, and in some of the photographs I took around that time, of pensioners' lunch clubs and other community support groups in North Paddington, there is an unmistakable military bearing to many of the men, neatly turned out in jacket, collar and tie.

And it was not just the men. These shots are from a Women's Voluntary Service lunch club on the Harrow Road, where the aprons worn by the staff still had WVS Civil Defence badges sewn into them. More photos from North Paddington in the 1970s here.

HS2: Too Late For Some

Stan Passmore, 2013

When I met Stan Passmore and his friend George Phillips in 2013 they were both facing the prospect of the demolition of their homes on the Regent's Park Estate, to make way for the HS2 high speed rail terminus at the adjacent Euston station.

George Phillips, 2013

Stan, then aged 87, had lived in his fourth floor flat in the Eskdale block since 1961.  His near neighbour George, then aged 94, had lived in his since it was built in 1955. Both told me they hoped to die before the bulldozers arrived. George achieved his wish not long after, but Stan, who died earlier this month, lived just long enough to see his former home turned into a pile of rubble.  

Eskdale (pink block on right), Regent's Park Estate, 2013

Euston is now one giant construction site. Many hundreds of homes have been demolished, lives disrupted, businesses closed, graves dug up, ancient trees felled. And yet, even at this late stage in the progress of this misconceived project, the politicians are still debating whether to proceed. Whatever they decide, it will be too late for Eskdale and its former residents. More pictures here. More words here.

And Now For Something Completely Different....

Around 25 years ago, not long before I moved from my home of 14 years by the Grand Union Canal in North Paddington, a near neighbour began secretly embellishing the back yard of his one bedroom housing association flat with an extraordinary collection of home-made artworks.

Gerard 'Gerry' Dalton, who died last month at the age of 83, left behind an astonishing number of crudely modelled and painted statuettes that fill his back yard and line a narrow 50 metre strip of land that runs between the canal and the Victorian terrace that overlooks it. There is no public access, and the display is largely hidden from view by two rows of neatly clipped bushes. As things stand, the property will be cleared and re-possessed by Genesis, the housing association that owns it, on 31^st October.

According to a small ad hoc group of admirers who have started a crowd-funding campaign to preserve the works in situ, there are around 200 concrete and mixed media sculptures, 170 wall mounted works and a 50 metre long mural.

It is hard to know what to make of them. Irish-born Dalton, at various times a station porter, factory hand, and catering worker, clearly had a mischievous take on the historical record. The concrete statuettes – sculptures, artworks, monuments, call them what you will - are between two and three feet high, each with a roughly cast plinth, many of which are inscribed with the names of what appears to be a random selection of mostly long dead public figures. Emperor Vespasian, Prince Albert, assorted other royals, obscure aristocrats, Marcus Aurelius, Hercules, and Lord Lucan all get a look in. All the figures have painted red eyes. What was he trying to say?

Inside the flat, every inch of wall space is covered with framed pictures, mostly cut from magazines, with additions of paint by the artist. On the floors of the bedroom and living room are gaudily painted wooden models of Hampton Court, Buckingham Palace and various other stately homes.

  
Given the quantity of work on display, both inside and out, the flat is surprisingly clean. This presents further puzzles: where did all this productive labour take place? Casting concrete is a messy business. No sacks of cement are evident, nor the tools necessary to mix and model it. And how did several tons of the stuff get there? 

I guess the unanswered questions just add to the mystery of what the campaigners call a ”monumental body of site specific outsider art”. Whatever its significance, the campaign to save the collection has, according to The Telegraph and The Times, attracted some high profile supporters, including Jarvis Cocker, Nicholas Serota, Sir Charles Saumarez Smith CBE, Louis Platman, curator at the Geffrye Museum, the artist Richard Wentworth CBE and the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association.  If it survives the 31st October deadline (Genesis, not Brexit), maybe all will become clearer.  More pictures here.

 

From The Archives: Walterton And Elgin Action Group, 1985-1995

Seamus Clarke in his sub-standard flat before renovation, Walterton Estate, 1993

Another scanning session has resurrected a set of photos from the campaign by residents of two North Paddington estates to save their council-owned homes from sale to a private developer.  Explanation below.  More pictures here. 

In 1985, with the Greater London Council on the verge of abolition, Walterton and Elgin, two of its estates in the north of the borough of Westminster, were handed over to Westminster City Council.

The two estates, one comprised of Victorian terraces, the other of two 1960s towers surrounded by low-rise concrete blocks, were in poor condition. Without any consultation, the council immediately began drawing up plans to sell them off to private developers.

WEAG posters, Walterton Estate, 1987

Residents responded by forming the Walterton and Elgin Action Group (WEAG).  At very short notice, more than 200 tenants attended a meeting of the council's housing committee to demand that their needs and wishes should take priority.

It was the beginning of a seven year campaign, and WEAG, with a programme of inventive direct action and assistance from a wide range of sympathetic housing professionals, legal advisers and local Labour councillors, went on to draw up its own plan to save the homes for local people in need of rented housing. It lobbied council meetings, paid unannounced visits to the offices of property developers, signed petitions, and flooded the area with posters publicising its struggle.

Unannounced WEAG visit to Regalian Property Company, 1987

The Conservative led council, under the leadership of Dame Shirley Porter and concurrently fighting accusations of gerrymandering over its Building Stable Communities programme, resisted all the way. But in April 1992, the tenants and residents were victorious, their newly-formed Walterton and Elgin Community Homes (WECH) taking over the ownership and control of 921 homes, together with a dowry of £22 million to cover the cost of repairs and renovations.

Removing asbestos from a flat in Chantry Point, Elgin Estate, 1995

Public Sector Workplaces 1981-1991

Southwark Council, Lugard Road Kitchens, 1985

These photographs are from a set of newly scanned black and white negatives I shot in the 1980s, at a time when much of my work was commissioned by the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) and the National Association of Government Officers (NALGO). Others were taken for the Popular Planning Unit of the Greater London Council, then led by Ken Livingstone, and for a variety of other publications and organisations.  More photos here.

It was a time of rapid change and struggle in the public sector, with the radical “contracting out” privatisation policies of the Thatcher government compounding the impact of the 1970s public spending cuts under Labour that had culminated in the Winter of Discontent of 1978-1979.

Domestics occupy administrator's office, St.Mary's Hospital, 1981

These policies were disastrous both for the workers who provided our services, cutting jobs, pay and conditions in the NHS, local government and elsewhere, and for the service users who relied on them.

They weren't good for photographers either. Claims of commercial confidentiality, and a growing obsession with written consent forms, made access to contracted out workplaces much more difficult to obtain.

More text here.

Contracted out domestic worker, St.Charles Hospital, Notting Hill, 1986

Manchester City Council refuse incinerator, 1987

Brexit For Beginners

Paris 1996

From Powell to pandemonium: an assortment of Brexit-related images from my library can be found here. I wish they told a story, but nobody else can make much sense of it either. 

Enoch Powell 1983

Dover 2004

   

Nigel Farage, Margate 2015

Westminster 2018

Demolishing South Kilburn

South Kilburn Estate, 22-05-18

On South Kilburn Estate new concrete shells are rising from the rubble that was once Gloucester House and Durham Court. I've written before about Brent Council's 15 year estate regeneration scheme, and the implications of the changes of tenure that are at its core, but none of that captures the extraordinary visual impact made by the tearing down of people's homes, whatever the tenure. The most recent demolition phase lasted around six months. A bigger selection of images from that period is here. More words and pictures here.

South Kilburn, 22-3-18

South Kilburn Estate, 1-5-18

 

South Kilburn, 22-5-18

More at The Corner

Over recent months Speakers' Corner has taken on a new lease of life, not all of it healthy. The 'home of free speech' has become the arena for a weekly gladiatorial contest between Islamophobic English nationalists and a fluid group of young Muslim men, as eager to defend their religion as their opponents are to insult it. The result has been much noise, little enlightenment.

The conflict began in March, when the Austrian far-right Generation Identity leader Martin Sellner was refused entry to the UK and deported. The following week English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson and a large number of his supporters descended on Speakers' Corner to protest at what they regarded as a denial of their right to free speech. Some of them have been around ever since, apparently happy to have found an easily accessible target for their anger.

Testosterone levels are high (very few women are involved), and police intervention has become a regular feature. After some years during which there were often none to be seen at the Corner on a Sunday afternoon, police are now present in force, their vans strategically parked and rows of constables lined up to step in and separate the two groups when they overheat.

In another new development, the clashes are now available to the world beyond in the form of hours of mostly unedited, often chaotic footage posted on YouTube. Everyone is either filming or being filmed, sometimes both at the same time, and the resulting broadcasts can pick up 20,000 or more views within hours of posting.

So the place has got a lot busier, and although endless religious arguments remain its most prominent (and least interesting) feature, crowd numbers are well up, there are still some discussions worth a listen - and still the occasional frisson when the police go on manoeuvres. More 2018 pictures here, older photos from my book here.

Return to Speakers' Corner

Speakers' Corner 2017

Is it just winter, or is Speakers' Corner in terminal decline? On a recent visit – my first for over a year – religion, always a dominant presence, was the only thing on offer, mostly in the form of squabbles between Christian and Muslim preachers and hecklers. And there weren't more than three or four of those. I don't remember ever seeing such an unimpressive bunch.

It was the last, rather miserable, Sunday of 2017. Dull and damp, with occasional spots of rain, and darkness threatening by mid-afternoon. So maybe not a fair basis for judgement. I will be back to check. I hope I'm wrong.

For a record of how it used to be, my book Speakers' Corner, Debate, Democracy and Disturbing the Peace is still on sale at all good bookshops.

Lendlease: Someone Has Blundered

Elephant Park construction site, Southwark

Lendlease's controversial deal with Haringey Council may be looking precarious, but the developer is still going strong in Southwark, where it is replacing 1194 social rented flats on the once publicly owned Heygate Estate with a paltry 74.  A further 500 of a total of 2500 new homes in its Elephant Park scheme will be let at so-called 'affordable' rents, and the rest sold off. Purchase of a one-bed, shared-ownership flat requires a minimum household income of around £60K.
 

The now demolished Heygate Estate, 2002

The London Clearances (continued)

Walterton Road, North Paddington 1975

My first useful work as a photographer came about through involvement with housing campaigners at the tail end of the slum clearance programmes of the 1960s and 70s. In London, streets of poorly maintained, privately rented Victorian terraces were being torn down and replaced by a brave new world of modern homes in publicly owned estates of concrete apartment blocks.

Forty years on, that world has turned full circle. Now it is the 'castles in the sky' that are coming down, streets are all the rage, and council housing, now renamed 'social', is struggling to survive.

Gloucester House and the rubble of Durham Court, South Kilburn Estate, 2018

Across the road from the sub-standard flat that was my home back in 1975 (toilet and cold water sink on the shared landing, no bathroom), work has begun on Phase 2b of Brent Council's 15 year South Kilburn Estate regeneration scheme. Demolition of the low rise Durham Court blocks is underway, and the now deserted 18 storey Gloucester House awaits the wrecking crew.

If all goes according to plan, by 2029, when the final phase is scheduled for completion, 2400 new homes will have been built, 1200 for private sale, and 1200 let at social rent to existing secure tenants.

Partly demolished blocks, Durham Court, South Kilburn Estate

The buildings and landscaping completed so far are impressive, a big improvement on the bleak brutalist concrete they have replaced, and the scheme has attracted much praise. The council has also been lauded for its financial strategy, using income from the private sales to fund the homes let at social rents.

So what's not to like? In a convincing piece on Haringey's controversial partnership deal with Australian developer Lendlease on the Red Brick blog, Steve Hilditch argues that the most straightforward criterion for assessing the wave of regeneration deals being done by councils across the capital should be the number of social rented homes there will be at the end of the process.

“Thousands of mainly social rented homes will be knocked down and thousands of mainly private homes will be built. There will be many more homes overall, but, how will the proposed mix of market and sub-market homes tackle homelessness and the needs of people on the waiting list?  The type and tenure of new homes is as important as how many homes are built in total. Social rent remains the only truly affordable option for many people on lower incomes.”

On that measure, the figures for South Kilburn don't stack up. By 2029, 2400 new homes will have replaced 1610. Of the latter, 1420 were occupied by secure tenants and 190 by leaseholders. It's hard to know whether the prices leaseholders are getting for their compulsorily purchased homes match the prices demanded for the new (unlikely). But it is certain that 1420 secure tenants will not fit into the 1200 homes available for social rent. It is probable that enough of them will have been rehoused elsewhere to make the scheme work, but the net effect will be to reduce the number of social rent homes available across the borough, and to clear even more people on low or average incomes out of central London.

Kilburn Quarter, completed phase 2a of South Kilburn Estate regeneration scheme

Brent, like many others London councils, has been forced into this trade-off between private sales and publicly owned social rentals by central government funding cuts and the long-term disempowerment of local authorities. The new estate looks like it's going to be a nice place to live, and will provide much improved homes for the tenants who are rehoused on it - albeit at higher so-called 'target' social rents.  It will also increase the number of homes available for private sale and market rental – in itself not a bad thing, as long as they're occupied once bought. It's just a pity it won't be of any help in cutting the waiting list and housing the homeless.  More pictures here. More words and pictures here and here.

HS2. The Wrecking Begins

Reverend Anne Stevens and local resident Jo Hurford, Euston Square Gardens

On Friday the Reverend Anne Stevens, vicar of St.Pancras Church, spent two hours chained to a 100 year-old plane tree outside Euston station, whilst local residents handed out leaflets to passing commuters. Work has already started around the planned London end of the HS2 high speed rail link to Birmingham, but the protest marked a significant escalation in the disruption which will turn the area into a building site for an estimated 17 years. On Monday Euston Square Gardens will be fenced off, and the felling of its century-old trees will begin, clearing the park to make way for construction vehicles, expected to average 650 trucks a day.

As many have pointed out, HS2 as planned is seriously flawed. It is extremely expensive (and getting pricier by the week), poorly integrated with the existing network, and its London terminal is in the wrong place, a densely populated area already home to three of the capital's principal railway stations. To cap it all comes news that Carillion, one of the major contractors involved in construction of the new line, is in serious financial difficulty.

Whilst all taxpayers will be forking out the cash for this, local residents have the added nightmare of living through it, windows closed, day in day out for almost two decades.  More pictures here.  More words and pictures here and here.

An Archival Impulse

Committee Meeting, 510 Centre, North Paddington 1978

In the spirit of archivism, I'm making accessible an article I wrote for the British Journal of Photography in 2010 to mark the demise of Photoworks Westminster (formerly North Paddington Community Darkroom), a community-based photography project that I set up in the 510 Centre, a busy grant-funded advice and community centre at 510 Harrow Road, in 1976. A PDF of the piece can be downloaded here. 

A PDF of my book, That Was Then, This Is Now, which describes North Paddington context in which the project evolved, can be downloaded here.

This archival impulse has been prompted by a request from the Four Corners project in Bethnal Green which, in addition to documenting the heritage of its own film work, is creating a new archive exploring the photographic practice of its onetime neighbour, the Half Moon Photography Workshop (later Camerawork), from its creation in 1972 to its closure in 2004.

The travelling exhibitions, workshops and, above all, the roughly quarterly issues of Camerawork magazine (1976-85), were hugely influential at a time when a wave of community-based photography projects were springing up in various parts of the capital and elsewhere. As a self-taught photographer working in uncharted territory, the opportunity to read about and discuss the work of those with greater knowledge and experience was invaluable. I contributed what I could, but learned a lot more.

For those wishing to explore this bygone world further, there is now also a North Paddington Community Darkroom Archive at the Bishopsgate Institute, which includes a collection of laminated exhibition panels dating from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Meanwhile Gardens, North Paddington 1983

Dominica Democratic Association meeting, 510 Centre, 1977

The Dustbin of History: Kodachromes

It feels like sacrilege, but I am in the process of binning large numbers of Kodachromes.

In the days of colour film, Kodachrome was the gold standard. It's what the National Geographic photographers used, despite its now unthinkably slow speed (64 ASA, unless you were a masochist and went for the 25). It had other drawbacks: it had to be sent back to Kodak for processing, so couldn't be used on jobs that required a fast turnaround, and, to get the best out of it, accurate exposure was essential. But, correctly exposed, it produced transparencies with great colour, contrast and sharpness, and reputedly better archival stability than any other film. I used it on virtually all my foreign trips through the 1980s and 1990s.

It was only when picture desks started going digital, and image distribution switched from Royal Mail or motorcycle courier to FTP and email, that another disadvantage was revealed: Kodachrome's unique emulsion structure made it quite tricky to scan. Getting the colour and contrast right was not straightforward, and Digital ICE automated dust-removal, which worked well on other colour film stocks, could not be used. That meant dust and scratches had to be removed by hand in Photoshop. Scanning Kodachromes was hard work.

However, that's not why they're in the bin. Distributing images shot on colour transparency film to multiple publications meant shooting multiple frames, or making duplicates after the event.  After each trip one set went into my own filing cabinet, and selections of 'similars' went off to the various picture libraries that also distributed my work. Over the last few years they have all come back, like long lost homing pigeons: many agencies have closed, and those that haven't no longer deal in hard copies.

Once an image has been digitised, identical copies can be made effortlessly, with no loss in quality. There's no need for 'seconds' or spares. So, although I can't bring myself to throw away the original of anything worth scanning, I've finally got round to trawling through the stacks of returned suspension files, comparing 'similars', keeping the best, and dumping the rest.  What I'm doing is completely logical - it just feels like an unforgivable sin.

Pictured above is a binful of hundreds of slides from two trips to the Dominican Republic, for Christian Aid in 1983, and Oxfam in 1991. Scans of some of those I've kept are here.

Dominican Republic 1991