Bob Mazzer On The Tube
“There’s definitely a link between being born in Aldgate and taking all these pictures on the tube,” admitted photographer Bob Mazzer, “You don’t think you are starting a project, but one day you look back over your recent pictures and there are a dozen connected images, and you realise it is the beginning of a project – and then you fall in love with it.”
“For a while in the eighties, I lived with my father in Manor House and worked as a projectionist at a porn cinema in Kings Cross. It was called The Office Cinema, so guys could call their wives and say, ‘I’m still at the office.'” recalled Bob affectionately, “Every day, I travelled to Kings Cross and back. Coming home late at night, it was like a party and I felt the tube was mine and I was there to take pictures.”
Photographs copyright © Bob Mazzer
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Scary! Not a place I would want to be.
Wonderful photographs and quite an inspiration this morning.
Good one Bob.
*Lovelovelove*
It seems so strange to see pictures of people smoking or drinking on the underground. Although it wasn’t too long ago that both were banned. Good pictures and very much of their time; revealing and telling. More please.
Our present era appears so “sanitised” by comparison. I well remember the sour, woody and at times smoky smell of the underground when I was first brought to London for day trips as a boy in the ’70s and early ’80s.
Love them. Great days. Great pictures. What fun.
Love these crazy pics.
Brilliant photographs!
Street photography is a wonderful social history.
These are absolutely glorious. I think I’ll keep coming back to look at these for a very long time should I be in need of inspiration and a little touch of wonder.
Great photos, brilliant portrayal of social history.
Look forward to the next installment 🙂
The one I like is the one with the two policemen because the woman in the poster looks as though she taking part in the scuffle. All in all a very fine collection – more please!
Wonderful. Looking at these pictures feels like meeting a very old friend. In a way I can see that it might be scary to a young person now, it was so much more chaotic – but that was the beauty of it really. There was a space for genuine eccentricity then, not the sort of manufactured sort that is invented to sell clothes / anything else now.
Wonderful images. A time both long ago and yesterday. So much has changed and nothing. Brings it all back, my first glimpse of this strange land called London.
These are absolutely superb pictures, Bob – tender, clever, funny, tough, and boiling with vitality. As a photographer myself I take a special interest. Why haven’t we seen these before? Have you published a book? If not, do so.
bloody brilliant, just how it was!
Travelling on the tube at night is one aspect of London life I certainly will never miss, it always frightened me. When I first met my husband he would never let me travel on the tube alone in the evenings and would go out of his way to escort me home! I was interested to see a photo of someone lighting up here, I remember them banning it not long after I moved down to London in 1984, then it being banned from the platforms after the terrible tragedy of the Kings Cross fire. Remember the scary old wooden escalators they had on some lines?
So good!
Incredible that smoking was allowed until Kings X fire.. madness.
Been away from London for over twenty five years now and this superb collection of photographs brought an old way of life flooding back with crystal clarity. Wonderful and thank you!
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
Just brilliant.
Great photos! I loved seeing the cars with the wooden floors and the old bench seats. These photos depict a time long before I ever set foot in London but still, I pine to be there and to have experienced the Tube during this time period.
Can anyone identify the station where the musicians appear to be playing on a platform between two tracks? I’ve not seen that configuration in an underground station before, only above ground.
Didn’t think the one with a H&M poster in it could be real. But turns out they opened their first shop in the UK in 1976. Who knew?
I’ve already commented on these photos, and want to say more. As Len Day says above, the pictures are not only full of action – they are clever. Look at the guy in the raincoat and trilby peering through spex and a magnifier at his paper. Behind him is a receding line of dark and blurred figures, while on the right is the diagonal platform edge rushing (like a train) into a black hole. And the compositional dynamics of the third-from-last: edgy diagonals everywhere – legs, arms, shoulders, the window frames, the newspaper – and in the centre, the steady vertical of a man with his head in his hands. Brilliant stuff.
In answer to Shelly, above – Looks like Angel, on the Northern line, now remodelled with two separate platforms.
Thank you Nicholas!
Shelly, that configuration still exists on some underground stations, Clapham Common for one. Must be a nightmare at rush hour!
What great images of dear old London…what a wonderful old dump it is!
These photographs NEED to be in a book that can be pored over again and again – just wonderful!
Thank you so much for sharing these – they are excellent and such a nostalgic reminder of what the Tube used to be like (and still is sometimes). More Bob Mazzer photographs, please.
Great images!
Indeed, Denise. I’ve only just spotted the headline in the paper on the old guy’s lap in the photo third from last: ‘London at heart’. Absolutely perfect.
What a great collection of photos. It really shows how things have changed – or sanitised today as someone commented earlier.
It’s also odd how some of the station photos, like Stockwell, seem so familiar because of the same basic structure, yet look like a world away!
Many thanks for sharing. Try and get them published if you can. They’re a great social commentary and excellent quality.
Echoing some of the comments already made, it seems at the same time familiar and alien. There’s also something charming about some of the photos – the two women with their drinks presumably from the pub. And yet, there’s a quite sinister, almost violent dimension, reflecting my perception of cities being edgy.
It’s nearly 10 years since I lived in London but on the rare occasions I go there, I try to avoid using the tube. Everyone with their earphones and staring at little screens….
The most exhilirating set of photos I have seen in ages , such a cross section of life , brimming with poetic moments , thanks so much for sharing Bobs amazing work with us Gentle Author. Stand outs , the man with the roll of insulation sitting primly on his lap, the woman juggling , the Indian woman sitting in the photo booth,the boys with their trophies, all the images just work so well together , I also love how people are engaged in their own space , oblivious to an entirely different scenario going on beside them.
Bob , you must be on alert the whole time ,lucky us ! well done
Shelly: there are still two stations on the Northern Line which have a narrow island platform like that: Clapham North and Clapham Common. It looks really dangerous.
There are great photos, they really take me back to my time in London. I used to take the Northern line quite a bit. Often saw scenes similar to those in the photos, especially later in the evenings.
I remember the old station at the Angel mentioned above, it’s true it was a tad scary at rush hour, and the street exit was a sort of shed.
I also remember Aldwych station before it was closed, it’s now frequently used as a film set I believe.
Exactly my reaction, A granny! Yet I was riding the Tube regularly during the eighties, and don’t remember being scared.
The past really is another country. I remember finding the tube intimidating late at night. And those slatted wood floors which always had fag butts nestling in the grooves!
A great collection of photos. Can we see them in an exhibition soon? Or a book?
it’s not *that* sanitised these days actually. i live here and already seen people throwing up in the tube while seated. after that I always wonder how clean the seats are (or if they simply air-dried overnight). they banned smoking and drinking, of course, other than that a ride back home in the evening did not change too much, i’m afraid.
Quality!
Life before the nanny state and it’s 1984 overtones.
This is both refreshing to see and yet melancholic at the same time.
Thank you.
Wonderfully evocative photos.
Wonderful. When I look at pictures like these it makes me realise why I love London and Londoners so much. I never want to leave.
AMAZING!!!! I would live on the Tube if I could!
fantastic pictures,really enjoyed looking at them,thanks
The Northen Line was known as the Misery Line, and sometimes there were so many people crammed onto the platform at Clapham Common that you really were scared of being pushed off the edge. Other than that, I don’t ever remember being scared, despite travelling alone late at night regularly. I can still remember the scratchy feel of that seat covering fabric against my legs in summer!
Imagine if that kid taking the photo grew up and took pictures….remember they would always serve you last drinks and then never let you drink em’ so you had to take with…..remember you were always pushed up against a nightmare who had pissed imself or worse..remember jumpin’ the gates…ah down in a tube station at midnight eh…happy days..we luuurve a bit of it!
I love the Underground and these images are fantastic.
An underground story for you…
Central line 11.32pm
Standing at the platform.
Gently rocking with the glow of wine.
Laughter bubbling just beneath.
The carriages flash by.
As they slow a handsome face passes,
buried in a book.
Meandering down the platform,
seeking that dark head.
Discovered, step light-toed inside.
Plump down beside him,
a nervous thrill at the breast.
Glancing over to discover his book.
The train slows again.
The moment’s almost gone.
Nothing to gain, all to lose.
Tap at the shoulder.
He turns, lips touch,
rush to the door.
Shame burning, don’t look back.
A tap, he’s there.
A kiss goodbye.
The door slides open.
Stepping out to the empty platform,
I turn back and we smile.
Superb photos, they should be in the archives of the UK’s Ministry of Culture…
Absolutely amazing ethnnographic-like recording of London’s underground (literally and metaphorically speaking…) history!
Well done mate…
Greetings from an ex-Londoner who spent 12 years in the capital…
As a Londoner who grew up in those times, and in those places, that is a beautiful trip down memory lane. Still remember the smell of the old tubes…and that constant slightly edgy feeling about them. A world away from todays…but only by a thin veneer of technology
What a depressing dump London looks in these pix and yet we who were there know it wasn’t and was wildly swinging as a colourful new pop culture reignited the creative industries. This photographic selection compares with films like Blow Up and A Bigger Splash where location shooting reveals London in the 60s as a dump too, with sooty public buildings and plenty of postwar bomb craters. Yet it was also wildly swinging itself into a feisty new reforming future!
The tube is so so so much better than it used to be, I often laugh at people who go on about the ‘good old days’. They don’t have a clue!
Nostalgia rocks!!!! Life seemed less complex then. Get drunk, get laid and have fun
LOVE, I wish they were scratch and sniff for those that cannot remember or know. Makes me smile 🙂
Love! Punks and fag butts. Reminds me of my childhood and travelling back and forth from shpeherd’s bush to aldgate east for my ‘dad weekends’.
So cool! I love all the shameless snogging!
I love these. Well done, absolutely incredible. Makes me proud to be a Londoner.
Plus it makes me miss the days before the smoking ban…
Is the fourth picture a young Nigella?
Amazing – there’s something so strange yet familiar about these images. And also, the noted absence of mobile phones recording the tube high jinks…
Is that Charlie Brooker in No. 12 next to the red-haired, erm, person?
Wow! Evocative, humourous and in the nicest possible way nostalgic.
thanks for sharing!
Such a wonderful project! These photographs really show the grit and reality as well as the joy and affe toon on the Tube!
They show history as it happened and that is something to be very proud of!
Love them!!
I spy with my little eye Philip Seymour Hoffman in a black and white band.
These are brilliant. Thanks for showing us!
london now feels like the people have been bashed like round pegs into square holes and are all walking around looking for approval from the hammer that bashed them. These images betray the Human animal at home in the metropilis- very refreshing- and i’d glady undo years of ‘investment’ and makeovers to return to those more honest times. thankyou for rasing your camera to the everday incredilble london that was!
So evocative of an era that for many of us saw the end of one society and the start of another.
Take a picture today and look back in twenty years and I bet the scene will look rough n ready as well. Bloody lovely pictures.
Great pictures Bob….hope to see you in Hastings sometime…best Veryan
Fascinating snaps – eerie and nostalgic in equal amounts!
Yep I remember the tube like this always vibrant always surprising and always challenging
Just awesome shots in every way, a book m’thinks!
I love these pics. I am about to move back to London after 5 years of being away and this has made me very excited about my return. Nothing like some good old people watching on the tube… 🙂
I remember as a kid people being able to smoke on the tube, still beggars belief!
Fantastic pictures. I love travelling on the tube, the best variety of people watching you’ll ever get 🙂
Would be really lovely if you could find the kid taking your photo and see if he has that photo still. The juxtaposition of the two would be wonderful to see.
These are AMAZING.
I can SMELL them!
Great pictures but it winds me up when people try to reinvent the past or complain about things being ‘sanitised’ now. They do the same thing talking about NYC in the ’70s and ’80s. It wasn’t better then, it wasn’t more fun, it was what it was: a transport system that was ugly and dangerous, filled with selfish and drunk people polluting carriages with cigarette smoke. It’s been rightly improved in the years since. Nostalgia is one thing, but hearking back to a previous age but glossing over murders and assaults is pretty revisionist.
I travelled back on the tube after many an evening. You never knew what you were going to see but I never felt afraid. Does anyone else remember the man who used to do tricks with a cigarette butt? He would stick it to his lip, make it disappear and then reappear behind your ear. I also saw somebody who supposedly caught their quiff in the doors of a Bakerloo train (the old red ones!) And then promptly burst into song.
I still travel by tube whenever I can. It does seem much more quiet these days but then I’m older too. I’m one of those people who now sits looking disprovingly when before I would have sat and sniggered behind my hand 🙂
How would Thomas who thinks that people who talk about the good old days haven’t got a clue? He’s obviously not old enough to have been there
Well done Bob. I knew my sisters and I were photographed by s tru pro xx
Fabulous photographs. Seems like a million years ago.
I’m looking at the photo’s and I can hear music. Thank you for taking me back.
I love this pictures, particularly the ones of young people in subcultures. Thanks for sharing.
Wow, great stuff! These photographs are lovely. They are really moving and have a sensitive quality.
Lovely 80’s without internet, mobiles, tablets ….. and without free newspapers everywhere, simply enjoying people watching and admiring some looks and fashion of the time, amazing!!!!
Wonderful! Thank you!
Great shots from a lost era of London Underground.
Fabulous!
brilliant! times were hard but seems like the good old days now. great great pics bob. more.
A truly great collection. I can’t stop looking at them.
Bob, we met at Colin O’Briens book launch – we chatted briefly whilst queuing for the toilet.
Any plans to exhibit these?
Great to see this body of work generate so many comments it deserves the reaction, they are poignant images. Love it.
God, these are stunning.
Beautiful photos
Really quite affecting. Incredible shots and stories.
God, they bring back memories. I was at college in London in the 1980s and these photos look like a pretty accurate portrayal of my life then! I was never scared travelling on the Tube, but I do remember how regularly the trains would be delayed or end up stuck in a tunnel, sometimes for up to half an hour! At least that doesn’t happen any more.
Not quite heartbreaking …… but there’s a lot of my youth there.
A simpler time of more vivid and direct experience – though that’ll always be said.
OMG I love these… they are the best! i want to get them printed!
terriffic, complete with pictures of Connie the dog.
Really dig his flix, from America but it’s all in the same on passenger train’s cheers
the old dog really nailed it didn’t he?
These are brilliant BOB!
They are excellent and such a nostalgic reminder of what the Tube used to be like (and still is sometimes).
But this is what it all looked like. This is what it was like.
Love these photos especially since when I moved to Lonodn in 1994, many of these trains were being phased out. These images show the public transport party that I missed. Yet with your pictures, I feel only that I misplaced the invitation.
There is a picture of me juggling in the leopard print coat. Can I have a copy please?
I have been Bob Mazzers friend for over 60 years, when I look at these great reflections of underground life, you can see why he has so many admirers. People use the tube as a transport system and perhaps dont observe the undercurrent of humour, wit, and at times down right danger, all these things are reflected in Bobs lens, he has an artists vision of life.
If you know Bob you will share my love of a really great guy.
brian s
These are some wonderful documentary photographs, and bring back memories of travelling in London as a child. Call me nostalgic, but I miss the tube as it used to be, and I find the current presentation a little too clinical and emotionless, perhaps that’s what customers demand these days, but the unpainted aluminium and wood gave the tube a lot more character than the plastic coated everything we have today.
As someone who has been drunk on the tube (often), I can truly appreciate these wonderful pictures. Would love to see them displayed in a Gallery environment.
Bob, your images are full of magic….. they are wonderful………
Is it possible to buy a signed copy of any of your images ?
Hope to hear form you – Nicholas.
Was great seeing all the pictures. I lived in the underground through most of 74-81 bottling for performers and busking in the tube and in the West End. I recognised a few of the people in the pictures (some are now dead). Really bought back memories of climbing over the barriers, playing music in the trains and corridors, and drinking at the little bar on Liverpool Street on the Circle Line, and urinating in the corridors. It was a wild and crazy place to hang out… we would play music for sometimes 8 hours a day down there, while I passed the hat and sang the songs. Smoking all the time, in and out of the trains (not just tobacco). Last train out of Leicester Square every night down to Brixton, Stockwell or Clapham South.
I would love to know if you have more of these pictures. I am trying to get together images and video of Buskers and Street performers from the Seventies. There were some amazing people down the tube from dippers to tap dancing clowns. Perhaps I could recognise some more of these folks, and I’m sure the older current tube performers would love to see them.
Thanks for some great images!
marvelous photos…full of LIFE…
I shall join the chorus. Fabulous stuff. Oh how I laughed at the man with the clock but so many other beauties….the man reading the paper…the man with the roll of whatever it was…the woman in the fishnets…the bovver boys….thanks for my ride on the tube 🙂
This reminded me of when I first went up to work in London on the Underground back in 1950, I caught the District Line train at Beacontree and had to get to Liverpool Street Station, I was to start work in Great St Helens Bisopsgate. I’m not sure now where I was meant to change trains to the Central Line but what I do remember was when the train arrived at Aldgate, the station porter called out ” Aldgate all get out!” So I did!
I was fifteen years old to the day, 17th April 1950 and still wet behind the ears.
It was pointed out that the porter was having us on and I fell for it.
“Aldgate; Aldgate out”
🙂
Brilliant these photos have brought memories flooding back thankyo
Bob, I heard about your photos from your interview on the Robert Elms programme. Blimey, they are so wonderful. It is the London that I remember as a kid; rough and ready, full of character, no healthy and safety facsists and just raw and so memorable. I still love London, but this is version I return to so much in my memories. Great, great pictures and a record of then…. It is those slatted floors on the old tube trains and those buttons on a panel that a staff member used to operate to open the doors that I have not seen for a long time.
i love these! my favourites!
Some remarkable shots. An almost forgotten era of eccentricity and an acceptably unacceptable level of bad behaviour in public. Tell the young folks of today that in the seventies the tube was an underground Sodom and Gomorrah and they wont believe you ….no they won’t.
They always say you can’t rush art and that inspiration can not be forced. Your work is proof of this. Wonderful.
Fantastic. I remember the tube then and now. x The life and times of the London underground has been captured brilliantly. Thank you
Brilliant picture, thanks for sharing them 😉 x
I’m the little boy in the striped tee-shirt going up the escalators with my mum and a family friend. Great photos. Hits you right in the nostalgic heart looking at these.
Great photos, remind me of my mid-spent adolescence – and of why my parents didn’t want me to travel on the Tube at night!
Oh, what a life….
how can your get hold of prints ?
Utterly brilliant – you have captured the London I love. Thank you!
Visions of a time when the world wasn’t a homogenised bleached-bland pile of sterile excrement, and you could breathe without being detained by authoritarian bullies.
Bob Mazzer is a world-class photographer
Hi Just wanted to write a line to appreciate the tube pics, I was born in the 70’s and looking back on it all made me realise how times have changed, which you never think you will ever say growing up!
My youngest daughter is doing a project on the 20th century and talking about the 70’s 80’s and 90’s as if it was a lifetime ago…which of course is at the tender age of 11.
So anyway I am passing your link on to the teacher to help with the project so they can get a real feel of our time!
warm regards
An old mate of mine worked with the two cops making the arrest. Which dates it between 1984 and 1988. They are, on the left, PC 372CD Lawrence Eastley and on right PC 487CD Roy Moseley. They walked the beat from West End Central Police Station.
Night all.
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The post two above is almost correct . I worked with both the Pc,s pictured making the arrest . They are Pc 362cd on the left , and Pc 487cd Roy Moseley . Lawrence would have started work at West End Central in late 1979 or early 1980 , Roy by either 1980 or 81
. Lawrence looked after me when I joined the Met and was a great character, cheerful , fair , and hard working . He sadly took his own life years later after
completing his 30 years service . Great memories brought back by this photo . Miss you always buddy .
Never forget my first experince on the Tube, where I just could not stop laughing it was so fast and noisy but the people were entertaining. I was only a child and was thrilled! Then Tube
became a way of life for 15 years and did not stop being a pleasure to use. I do not like nor use
the bus. The Tube holds more interest and satisfaction. People watching for instance, you will always see interesting looking people, you never know what famous face you might get to sit next to & they will always speak to you. I remember the great hullyboo of the boy in the papers
who was one of the first kids to get his hands on the first edition of the first Harry Potter Book
and he was such fun to speak to, everyone was asking him questions, he was treated like a star just for buying a book! People open up and speak to you on the Tube, you hear interesting discussions and the there are times you are all stuck together like sardines in a tin, so intimate you pretend not to notice the mext persons thigh rubbing on yours! at least the seating is nore comfy and you are warm when you can get seated. In the 90’s three times I was cought on the Tube during the London bomings which was quite scary trapped alone in a carriage as you wait for an hour for the staff to check there are no bombs, but it did not put me off my favourite way to get from A to B in good old London. The Tube is one of the best and safest ways to travel. So, thank you for sharing your post and bringing back some good memories.
I L❤️ve the London Tube.
Endorse ALL the comments. Quite astonishing!