Postcard of the Day No. 110, Regent Circus

There’s no Regent Circus on today’s map of London but, according to Hermione Hobhouse in her History of Regent Street the intersection with Oxford Street was confusingly known as both Oxford Circus and Regent Circus in the first decade of the 20th. century.  It’s no surprise that in later years the name Oxford Circus would prevail, given that Oxford Street has its origin in medieval times whereas Regent Street was a product of more recent city planning.  Indeed the plans of John Nash included a grandiose Regent Circus far to the north of Oxford Street of which only a single quadrant was ever built.

The ornate shopfronts in the first postcard display a Victorian passion for embellishment in the pursuit of customers. Prominent among them are the premises of Peter Robinson, a department store that later expanded into a chain of more than 20 with a flagship store at Oxford Circus. Unusually, the card shows what would then be called a public convenience in an animated street scene including horse-drawn omnibuses and flower girls selling their blooms on traffic island. These itinerant traders made a popular subject for postcard publishers, often under the label of “London Life”. It wouldn’t have been an occupation for the faint-hearted, finding and securing a pitch, resisting extortioners and local bureaucracy alike.  Wherever they gathered the photographer wasn’t far away, even under the railway arches in Brixton.

 

Postcard of the Day No. 105, Paris - Halles Centrales

Few districts of Vieux Paris have been so frequently romanticised as Les Halles, the city’s produce market that was unceremoniously demolished in 1971 and relocated to the suburbs at Rungis.  For more than a century the market was housed in a series of twelve interconnected glass and cast iron pavilions (designed by Victor Baltard) but in the era of the vainglorious Georges Pompidou these masterpieces from the age of cast iron architecture were all too easily swept aside in favour of a meretricious and soulless shopping centre that was so unloved that it had to be replaced in less than three decades.  The exuberant vitality that had inspired Emile Zola to write “Le Ventre de Paris” (1873) was lost forever. A significant working class population would be relocated and never again would the neighbouring streets resound with the noise of thousands of heavily laden trucks, trolleys and trailers battling for space - one of the great urban spectacles would be totally erased.  These were unnerving times for Parisians who sought to defend their city from the intrusion of grossly inflated modern development. To the south the 56 floors of the Tour Montparnasse were already rising out of the ground and in the west the high-rise blocks at La Défense were taking shape.  A vocal campaign to preserve the Baltard pavilions sadly failed thanks to the prevailing infatuation with ostentatious modernism on the part of the ruling Gaullist politicians.  Minor concessions were made in the form of enhanced outdoor public space (now the rather dispiriting Jardin Nelson-Mandela) but the scheme progressed largely unamended. The black and white photographs were taken on a trip to Paris in 1974 when it seemed there would be no end to the excavation that had followed the ignoble demolition of Les Halles - it would be another 5 years before this vast hole in the landscape would be filled up with a grandiose interchange between the Métro and the RER and a depressing subterranean retail concrete box.