There are countless ways of looking at London and two new books narrow the focus by taking the idea of looking in more of a literal than a metaphorical sense: a cartographic approach, mapping the city through its boroughs; and a street-photography journey across the metropolis.
Sean Sheehan
“The boroughs of London” maps thirty-two boroughs, plus the anomaly that is the City of London. In 1965 the boroughs assumed their current existence as administrative units, at the level of local government, and each has a directly elected council.
You will still see old street signs naming a street as belonging, for instance, to the ‘borough of Finsbury’ (now part of Islington) or the ‘borough of Stepney’ (now part of Tower Hamlets) but these are the ghosts of extinct entities.
The tremendous worth of “The boroughs of London” lies in its maps, beginning with a double-page showing all thirty-two of them, distributed either side of the snaking River Thames.
The heart of the book resides in the sections devoted to each one of them accompanied by a more detailed map showing the borough’s main streets and landmark buildings. It is these sections where the reader will be surprised by seeing the geography of a borough. I discovered this when, after reading an absorbing piece in Brixton Buzz about the Labour Party losing control of Lambeth Council, I turned to this book to look at a borough that includes touristy spots like London Eye, the whole of Brixton and Clapham Common as well as places like Gypsy Hill.
Those who voted Green and not Labour in Lambeth looked at their London and saw the need to topple a council with close links to the cabal in Westminster that plotted against the Left.
Ovidiu Selaru came to the capital from Romania nineteen years ago – ‘For me, London became a restart in life – a clean slate, a second birth’ – and he saved up to buy a second-hand camera.
He speaks of walking in the footsteps of two great photographers, Chris Killip and Tony Ray-Jones, and, in the astonishingly good “London in frames”, he shares Killip’s concern for compositions of quotidian life where the silence around the scene is as suggestive as the scene itself.
The eye is drawn to the cyclist on Tottenham Court Road that he photographs but equally important are the five pedestrians in the shot, the empty spaces between them and the looming presence of anonymous buildings that dwarf human lives.
Many of his best photos in the book evoke the loneliness that fills any large city and the anomie that always threatens. Although there are pictures of Londoners enjoying themselves socially, the solitary individual walking down the steps of an Underground station or peering out through a bus window are figures of solitude that so often seem to define existence in London.
“The boroughs of London”, by Mike Hall and Matt Brown, is published by Batsford. “London in Frames” by Ovidiu Selaru is published by teNeues.
(Photos supplied by the publisher)
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