London’s history in 30 images

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Stephen Kingsley visits Wandsworth to see Portrait of London: Historic Photographs of London & the Borough of Wandsworth 


Local museums and galleries are a mixed bag: many have a touch of provincial, quirky charm but others can be painfully parochial or mundane.  Nevertheless, they are worth visiting, if only once.  And I was therefore excited at the prospect of visiting the new exhibition of photographs of London at the Wandsworth Museum, an institution new to me. 

The Museum re-opened in September 2010 after a three-year closure.  It comprises a main room with a permanent exhibition of artefacts documenting the history of Wandsworth and the surrounding areas, and a second room for temporary exhibitions.  There is also a cafeteria. The Museum shares its building with the De Morgan Centre’s collection of the work of William De Morgan, the ceramicist, and his wife Evelyn De Morgan, the painter, who were both involved with the Arts and Crafts Movement.  Despite the proximity of the two institutions, there is no combined entrance ticket and each charges £4.00 for admission (although full price ticket holders of tickets to the Museum are entitled to a £1.00 discount to the De Morgan Centre).

My first disappointment was on arrival at the Museum when I was told that I was too late as last admission was 40 minutes before closing time, which seemed somewhat unnecessary given the size of the exhibitions.  It was only after I had pointed out that there was nothing on the Museum’s website stating this that the cashier reluctantly stopped cashing up and sold me a ticket.  My second disappointment was the fact that the captions to the photographs were placed on the side of the display cases and thus completely invisible from the front and only discoverable after passing the photographs!

The exhibition, which comprises 60 or so photographs (a few of which are only postcard-sized) is divided into two.  The first part is from the Museum’s collection of local photographs of Wandsworth – using the current boundaries of the Borough and thus encompassing Putney and Clapham Junction as well the town of Wandsworth.  Whilst no doubt of passing interest to local residents, few of these photographs could be considered particularly informative to outsiders, particularly as the captions were not particularly descriptive – the caption to a picture of the now demolished aqueduct and the old bridge at Putney failed to say whether the view was north or south.

The second, and slightly larger, part of the exhibition is devoted to photographs of London proper and covers the 1850s to the 1960s – in just over 30 photographs.  These photographs come from the Museum of London archives, and many of them are quite familiar, but there were a few which were new to me: a very early photograph showing the construction of the Palace of Westminster; a charming – and I do not mean this in a patronizing way – photograph of a group of suffragettes taken by Christina Broom, the first woman press photographer; the artificial beach constructed at Tower Bridge in the 1950s.  There was one puzzling anomaly, a picture of one of the early Aldermaston marches which, no matter how much I looked at, seemed to have no geographical connection with London at all.

The lighting of the exhibition was pleasantly flat and subdued, although it could possibly have been brighter.  The Museum boasts that it is the first in the world to be exclusively lit my LEDs: cooler and cheaper to run than conventional lighting  as well as more environmentally friendly.

It is a pleasant enough exhibition, but with no earth-shattering discoveries.  Given the range in time it is a useful introduction to historic photographs of London for those that have not had an opportunity to see many before.