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.

 

Leipzig 1931

YouTube’s relentless algorithms invade our minds with recommendations designed to trap us in an ever shrinking universe constructed from our innermost prejudices and secret preferences but there are rare moments when they pull a hidden gem from the deep seams of mediocrity and something of unexpected beauty rises to the surface.  Which is how this mesmerising, sunlit portrait of a world that was creeping toward a dark decade of destruction and mass murder landed on my screen. For 30 dreamlike minutes we travel through the high summer streets of Leipzig watching the city street life in orbit around a tram driver’s view of a world in motion.  None of this was planned - the film was produced for driver training purposes.

Along the way an army of local citizens saunter across the tram tracks - businessmen and lawyers, street cleaners, road repairmen, shop workers, window cleaners carrying ladders, postal workers, and a succession of handcarts and trolleys to and fro, desperate to avoid any unseemly haste, each one calculating their margin of safety to the last second. No sign of the stereotypical Teutonic submission to rules and regulations in 1931 - motorists drive their cars, trucks, and delivery vehicles at every conceivable tangent across the path of the tram.  Cyclists, male and female alike, weave through the traffic as if defended by an invisible forcefield.  Most alarming are the passing horse-drawn wagons piled high with parcels, packing cases, sacks, beer barrels and items of furniture that make slow and deliberate turns in front of the oncoming tram just seconds away from tragedy.

In the suburbs the tram runs along the centre of broad, straight boulevards lined with trees.  Closer to the city we pass along residential streets with tall mansion blocks, streets that contract on the approach to the city before expanding again into grandiloquent squares and plazas linked by busy shopping streets where luxury hotels trade side by side with stately department stores and shopping arcades. Tram tracks divide and converge at complex junctions and snake around opera houses, banks, court rooms, theatres, museums and concert halls. A thousand commercial signs of every dimension announce their services and compete for attention. City landmarks, including the massive Hauptbahnhof and the Hotel Astoria glide past. For the dedicated observer of street life it’s a glorious treat.

 

London Life in Postcards

Street life was a popular subject with postcard publishers in the early decades of the last century. In London, as elsewhere, the streets teemed with indigents from the lower orders, desperate to scrabble a living from commerce or deceit. Street entertainers, news vendors, dangerous and exotic animals, musicians and escapologists had their images reproduced on thousands of cheap postcards and offered for sale to customers who could take comfort from the fact that their station in life, however modest, was at least superior to this gallery of rogues and miscreants. The status of the Sandwich Man was not to be envied. The bowler hatted musicians may have perched a little higher in the social order but their talent for engaging the higher faculties with melodious serenading on flute and harp can only be guessed at. The enduring fascination with this subject extended to the post-war years, although by this time Britain could only be shown in black and white. The resolutely monochrome spectators of Charing Cross Road tell us as much as we need to know about that lugubrious period in our national life. I like to think of the figure in chains as that of Roger Stone but, of course it represents the great Brexit Warrior struggling to regain sovereignty.

Les Rois du Pavé

This book offers a dazzling excursion through the streets of Paris in the years leading up to the Great War when the streets and pavements were the workplace for thousands of traders, performers, labourers and confidence tricksters. For some the challenge was to buy low and sell high with the greatest profits going to those with the greatest flair for theatrics. Almost any daily necessity - bread, fruit and veg could be bought on the street, along with carpets, ice cream, barometers and chestnuts. Others had only their bodies to sell, from sex workers to sandwich-board men. Some were prepared to be transformed into mobile advertisements – see the man promoting the merits of Bière Celtique with an outsize bottle attached to his hat and the brand name printed on his trousers. Selling services was another popular strategy and offered employment to knife-grinders, street photographers, basket menders, tooth pullers and public letter-writers without the expense of an office, studio, workshop or surgery. There were many for whom the pavement was a performance space for demonstrations of physical skills and endurance or a place of entertainment with musicians, conjurors, bird-charmers, mime artists and puppet theatres.

This activity was only possible because of the efforts of road menders and pavers whose back-breaking toil kept the streets in good order. No less essential was the contribution of the street sweepers, the sewer workers and the forces of law and order. Bus, tram and taxi drivers kept a constant flow of potential customers along the boulevards. Another group had nothing to sell but their labour and they formed a small army of refuse collectors, porters, water carriers and lamplighters. Lowest of all in status were les mégottiers who gathered up the discarded cigar and cigarette ends as part of an exercise in extended use. These were citizens of the lower orders who supported themselves by wit and ingenuity, driven outdoors by necessity to persuade the passing public to pay for their products or services. This book finally honours a marginalised community of the economically disadvantaged that brought colour and vitality to the streets of the city.

It’s no surprise to see more than a few of these photos were taken by Eugène Atget but the net had to be cast wider and the Agence Roger-Viollet was a productive source. The great majority of images are from the author’s (Jean-Louis Celati) personal collection and may well be scanned from vintage postcards. None the worse for that, all the images are remarkable for their definition and clarity. The human subjects confront us in all their complexity, sometimes diffident, sometimes defiant but most often simply absorbed in their tasks. There are smiles of triumph, smiles of contentment and there are stony faces that give nothing away. And it’s not entirely a lost world – many of these activities persist into the present despite the best efforts of capital to privatise public space and designate them as a public nuisance. To see further examples, see the 2010 blogpost, Emperors of the Highways.

The Edge of the World

Penzance has the feeling of a town on the edge of Britain. With only the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Great Western Railway’s westward expansion came to an abrupt stop here. A well established local independent bookshop chose its name accordingly. When we visited in March, new shop premises were in preparation and shop-fitters were installing the final section of fascia panelling. Which made for a nice pair of photos and served as an encouraging sign of defying conventional wisdom which holds the days of local high street bookselling are all but over.

Disasters Narrowly Avoided

Another series of trade cards issued by Palmin, manufacturers of coconut oil products – this time from the 1920s on the subject of children and road safety. An interesting group of scenarios featuring careless children and reckless road users - also a demonstration of corporate social responsibility on the part of business. Anything more than a marginal impact on human behaviour would appear unlikely but nobody could disagree with objective of improving public safety. Vulnerable youngsters in parlous situations are frequently depicted on these cards and reflect parental anxieties common to all cultures. Although the illustrator has thrown the unfortunate victims in all directions, care has been taken to avoid upsetting the audience with excessively graphic content. Follow this link for more hazards to children.

Jolly Coppers on Parade

Until recently it was a British thing to sentimentalise our police force and shower them with uncritical affection. Their legendary courtesy, willingness to redirect those who lost their way and their anachronistic uniforms made them seem less threatening than their swaggering overseas counterparts in paramilitary dress equipped with firearms, tear gas and water cannon. In recent decades the police have had to adapt to rising levels of crime and social disorder and now project a much less comforting presence on our streets, clad in battle-dress with Tasers, bodycams and automatic weapons at the ready. In reality the cosy world conjured up in these postcards never really existed and many aspects of police work were carried out in a summary fashion with little regard for the finer points of justice. The days when police cars came fitted with warning bells and minor offences could be dealt with by means of a sharp smack to the head are never going to return.

Even More Faultfinding

Another batch of Find the Fault has come my way. This transport related set reflects Britain in the mid-1950s but could have been offered for sale many years later in line with the Dennis Productions business model – why innovate when you can profitably recycle? The drawings are conservatively styled – no flamboyant gestures, neutral in tone, soberly conceived. Something of Ant and Bee (Angela Banner, illustrated by Bryan Ward) about them but lacking the eerie precision that gives the former such a haunting presence. Road transport features on most of this series and makes up this selection. The streets and roads are orderly and soporific. Stiff and robotic figures are posed at intervals, with eyes downcast and devoid of social interaction. Vehicles and signage appear anachronistic and there lurks a suspicion that dark events may be playing out just off-stage. The imagination is encouraged to fill the spaces that mediocre illustration leaves blank. The listed faults are often pedantic in the extreme but the idea of a double decker bus lacking a staircase is admittedly unsettling. Pedantry is infectious and unrecorded faults can soon be found – such as the presence of a smoke-emitting pipe smoker on the lower deck of a bus in No. 37.