Colin O’Brien, Photographer Of London Life
Can you spot Colin O’Brien, the photographer of LONDON LIFE, popping up behind his mother with Leica in hand while she was trying on hats in a department store on Oxford St in the nineteen-fifties? Colin’s mother looks puzzled yet patient while he takes the second picture. I wonder if she ever imagined where it would all lead?
Looking at the photographs of Colin aged seven with his Box Brownie and as a teenager with his first Leica, his destiny as a photographer might seem obvious to us. But I do not think Colin realised then that the affectionate snaps he took of the childhood world he knew growing up in Clerkenwell at the edge of the City of London, post-war, would become such a compelling photographic testimony in retrospect.
Today it is my pleasure to publish this gallery of rare images of Colin in front of the lens, taken by family and friends, illustrating the growth of the young photographer to maturity.
Yesterday, I announced the publication of LONDON LIFE in June, compiling more than two hundred of Colin’s photographs from 1948 until the present day into a handsome hardback photographic monograph tracing the everyday lives of Londoners through seven decades. As with our other titles, I need to gather a group of readers who are willing to invest £1000 each. Please drop me a line at Spitalfieldslife@gmail.com if you would like to help bring this exciting project to fruition and I will send you further information.
Additionally, you can support publication by pre-ordering LONDON LIFE from the Spitalfields Life Online Bookshop and we will send you a signed copy in June with a complimentary copy of Colin’s previous book, TRAVELLERS’ CHILDREN IN LONDON FIELDS as a gesture of appreciation.
Colin’s parents on their wedding day in 1938, taken on the steps of Victoria Dwellings in the Clerkenwell Rd where Colin grew up
Colin marches in the Clerkenwell Italian procession in the early forties
Colin with his first camera, a Box Brownie
Colin photographed by Solly, a local Photographer in Exmouth Market
Colin’s parents with their young son the roof of Victoria Dwellings, Clerkenwell
Colin is Head Boy at Sir John Cass School, Aldgate
Colin with his first Leica
Colin on the roof of Victoria Dwellings with St James Clerkenwell in the background
A self-portrait, skylarking with pals at the Kardomah Cafe, Oxford St
Colin looking sharp in the sixties
Colin looking with-it in the seventies
Colin at his photography show on Waterloo Station
The Gentle Author’s portrait of Colin O’Brien on the balcony of the flat in Michael Cliffe House, Clerkenwell, which Colin moved into with his parents when it was newly-built in 1966.
If you would like to help me publish LONDON LIFE, a monograph of Colin O’Brien’s photographs from 1948 until the present day, please drop me a line at Spitalfieldslife@gmail.com
Click to pre-order a copy of Colin O’Brien’s LONDON LIFE published by Spitalfields Life
Click here to see over fifty stories that Colin has photographed for Spitalfields Life
Cover design by Friederike Huber
Over the winter, I have been collaborating with Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & Designer Friederike Huber to create a handsome hardback photographic monograph of Colin’s pictures entitled LONDON LIFE and now I am appealing to my readers to help us publish it in June.
Containing more than two hundred photographs arranged chronologically and selected from seven decades of work in the capital, LONDON LIFE is a social record of breathtaking expanse and I believe Colin OʼBrienʼs superlative photography – distinguished by its human sympathy and aesthetic flair – stands comparison with any of the masters of twentieth century British photography.
Since 1948, Colin has been photographing the life of Londoners, capturing dramatic and affectionate images which speak eloquently of change and continuity in the daily existence of the city and its people. Born in Clerkenwell in 1940, Colin was a photographic prodigy, graduating from taking pictures of his pals with a Box Brownie at eight years old to using a Leica in his teenage years and photographing the car crashes outside his window, at the junction of Clerkenwell Rd and Farringdon Rd.
In those days, Colin took his films down the Fleet St in person where his pictures often found their way into the pages of national newspapers and ever since he has pursued a personal photographic project of recording the drama of London life.
Out of hundreds of pictures, two stand out for me as milestones. One is Colin’s tender photograph of his mother taken in the fifties. In the picture, she is making tea in the scullery of Victoria Dwellings, the tenement where he grew up but which the family left when Finsbury Council rehoused them in the newly-built Michael Cliffe House. This early photograph witnesses another world to that of Colin’s recent portrait of Jasmine Stone and her little daughter, taken when they were evicted from a hostel in Newham last year and occupied an empty Council House as a protest against the disposal of social housing by the Local Authority.
At this current moment of unprecedented change, when much of the history of the capital is threatening with being erased by redevelopment, Colin O’Brien’s LONDON LIFE is an important book that grants us a necessary perspective in time, reminding us of the journey that we – as Londoners – travelled to get here.
As with our other titles, I need to gather a group of readers who are willing to invest £1000 each. Please email Spitalfieldslife@gmail.com if you would like to help bring this exciting project to fruition and I will send you further information.
Additionally, you can support publication by pre-ordering LONDON LIFE from the Spitalfields Life Online Bookshop and we will send you a signed copy in June with a complimentary copy of Colin’s previous book, TRAVELLERS’ CHILDREN IN LONDON FIELDS as a gesture of appreciation.
Colin’s mother makes tea in the scullery in Victoria Dwellings, Clerkenwell
Raymond Scallionne & Razi Tuffano, Hatton Garden in 1948
Daytime accident in Clerkenwell, 1957
Snow in Clerkenwell on New Year’s Eve, 1961
Piccadilly Circus at night, 1959
Colin’s mother tries on hats in Oxford St in the fifties
Playing on a bombsite in the City of London
Oxford St at Christmas
Safeway Supermarket in the sixties
Battersea with the power station in the distance, sixties
Kids skylarking in the seventies
Regents Canal, Hackney
Brick Lane Market, eighties
Ice Cream kids, eighties
On Chatsworth Rd, eighties
Diana Dead, nineties
Demolishing a tower block in Hackney, 1999
Baby at a fair in Victoria Park
The last day of Clerkenwell Fire Station, 2014
Speakers’ Corner, 2014
Spitalfields Nativity 2014
Jasmine Stone, Focus E15 Mothers, Newham 2014
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
If you would like to help me publish LONDON LIFE, a monograph of Colin O’Brien’s photographs from 1948 until the present day, please drop me a line at Spitalfieldslife@gmail.com
Click to pre-order a copy of Colin O’Brien’s LONDON LIFE published by Spitalfields Life
Click here to see over fifty stories that Colin has photographed for Spitalfields Life
Nippers At The National Portrait Gallery
Burne-Jones’ Works in the East End
These photos record the moment when Horace Warner introduced the Spitalfields Nippers to the Whitechapel Gallery at its opening in 1901. Now it is my pleasure, over a century later, to present the Spitalfields Nippers at The National Portrait Gallery in an illustrated lecture on Thursday April 2nd at 7pm, showing the photographs and telling the stories surrounding their creation.
Sir Edward Burne-Jones “If hope were not, hearts should break”
Tired of Art – A little Dorset St sleeper in Whitechapel Picture Gallery
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Click here to order a copy of Horace Warner’s SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS
Capper & Sons Of Gracechurch St
If any readers are considering investing in new outfits for spring, they might find some ideas here in these plates of over a century ago from Capper & Sons of 63 & 64 Gracechurch St, High Class Tailors, Riding Habit & Breeches Makers, & Juvenile Outfitters, courtesy of the Bishopsgate Insitute.
Single Breasted Chesterfield Overcoat – in soft black and blue llama
Cappers’ ‘Seymour’ Coat – made in new west of England waterproof coatings
Lounge Jacket Suit – in all the latest shades of Cashmere
Double Breasted Loung or Yachting Suit – in navy blue serge or cheviots and striped flannels
Morning Coat & Waistcoat – in black cheviot, llama and various cloths
Frock Coat & Waistcoat – in black Vicuna with silk facings
Double Breasted Chesterfield Overcoat – in Venetians, Beavers and Vicunas
Double Breasted Travelling Ulster – in waterproof but not airproof cloth
Dress Jacket Suit – in fine elastic twill or vicuna
Dress Suit – lined throughout in silk with silk facings
Norfolk Jacket & Knicker Suit – in west of England, Scotch & Irish tweeds
Boys’ Harrow Suit – in Cappers’ indestructible school suitings
Boys’ Eton Suit – made to measure in fine elastic twill
Cappers’ ‘Cottesmore’ Habit – with Norfolk plaits back and front
Cappers’ Quorn Habit – in fine Meltonian cloth for hard wear
Images Courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You might like to read these other stories about commerce in Bishopsgate & Gracechurch St
Businesses in Bishopsgate 1892
At James Ince & Sons, Umbrella Makers
Charles Goss’ Bishopsgate Photographs
Save The Trees Of Spitalfields
We need the trees in Spitalfields to remind us that these were once fields. In front of the 1927 Fruit & Wool Exchange are a line of six magnificent London Plane trees that have stood there for a generation in Brushfield St, yet these are now threatened with felling by Exemplar Properties, the developers, who seek to get rid of them to make the demolition of the building easier.
As many readers will remember, almost nobody in Spitalfields wanted the redevelopment of the Fruit & Wool Exchange into corporate offices and a shopping mall. Tower Hamlets Council voted unanimously twice to reject the proposal but Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, exercised his autocratic power to overrule them and force the development on us.
So we are losing the Fruit & Wool Exchange and The Gun pub – and now, to add insult to injury, Exemplar Properties want to cut down our trees too. Yet there is no actual necessity to do this to construct the new building and the trees are in a Conservation Area where preservation of the quality of the environment should be paramount. The trees provide an attractive green canopy in summer and offer dramatic silhouettes against Christ Church in winter. They are healthy, strong specimens between thirty to forty years old and are not a safety hazard, so there is no justification for their removal. Felling these trees serves no-one’s interests but Exemplar Properties.
The truth is that we shall need these trees even more in future to ameliorate the environmental damage of the construction project and then to provide a measure of screening from the overblown development when it is complete.
They have taken the Fruit & Wool Exchange and The Gun against the wishes of the majority of local people, but it is in our power to stop them taking the trees.
Click here to register your objection to the felling of the trees in Brushfield St
You may also like to read about
Clive Murphy & Joan Lauder, The Cat Lady
Joan Lauder, The Cat Lady of Spitalfields (1924-2011)
In recent years, the Cat Lady of Spitalfields has become a legendary figure in East End lore, acquiring an entire mythology of stories as time goes by. In my imagination, she is a mysterious feline spirit in human form that prowls the alleys and back streets – a self-appointed guardian of the stray cats and a lonely sentinel embodying the melancholy soul of the place.
Imagine my delight to discover that Clive Murphy, the Oral Historian who lives above the Aladin Curry House, befriended her and recorded her entire biography over many months in 1991. Now the Cat Lady has a name, Joan Lauder, and in Clive’s portrait above you see her sitting in his kitchen at 132 Brick Lane, dictating into a tape recorder and looking uncannily feline in her dappled grey fur coat.
Although she was widely assumed to have died when she vanished from Spitalfields towards the end of the last century, in fact Joan Lauder lived in a series of homes from 1995 until her death just four years ago. Clive remained in contact with Joan and was one of her only two regular visitors right up to the end. Over the twenty years they knew each other, an unlikely and volatile friendship grew between Clive & Joan based upon mutual curiosity.
Clive Murphy has decided that now at last the truth about the Cat Lady can be revealed and he is editing his transcripts into a book of Joan’s life entitled ‘Angel of the Shadows.’ Thus Clive has permitted me to publish his introduction today as a sneak peek, accompanied by some of the photographs that he took when he accompanied Joan the Cat Lady on her rounds back in the early nineties, tending to the feral creatures of Spitalfields that no-one else loved.
At Angel Alley, Whitechapel, 5th March 1992
Feeding the cat from The White Hart in Angel Alley, 5th March 1992
In Gunthorpe St, 5th March 1992
Buying cat food at Taj Stores, Brick Lane, 3rd August 1992
In Wentworth St, 3rd August 1992
Calling a cat, Bacon St, 3rd August 1992
The cat arrives, Bacon St, 3rd August 1992
Alley off Hanbury St, 2nd August 1992
Hanbury St, 26th November 1995
At Aldgate East, 3rd August 1992
At Lloyds, Leadenhall St, 3rd August 1992
Walking from Angel Alley into Whitechapel High St, 3rd August 1992
Beware Of The Pussy, 132 Brick Lane, 26th November 1995
Clive visits Joan in her Nursing Home, 1995
ANGEL OF THE SHADOWS, The Life of the Cat Woman of Spitalfields
The women I have loved you could count upon the digits of one hand – my mother, her mother, our loyal companion Maureen McDonnell, the poet Patricia Doubell and the demented, incontinent Joan Lauder, the Cat Lady of Spitalfields who, in 1991, when I first spoke to her was already my heroine, a day-and-night-in-all-weathers Trojan, doggedly devoting herself to cats because human beings had for too long failed her. She looked at me with suspicion when I suggested we tape record a book. Only my bribe that half of any proceeds of publication would fall to her or her favoured charities and enable the purchase of extra tins of cat food persuaded her at least to humour me. I could swear I saw those azure eyes, set in that pretty face, dilate. I had entrapped her with the best of intentions as she, I was to learn, often entrapped, also with the best of intentions, the denizens of the feral world to have them spayed or neutered in the interests of control. But to the end, her end, I don’t think she ever trusted or respected me. I once found her surreptitiously laying down Whiskas in my hallway for my own newly-adopted cat which I named Joan in her honour. And she once spat the expletive ‘t***’ at me in a tone of total dismissal. To be called a foolish and obnoxious person was hardly comforting, given that I believe my own adage ‘in dementia veritas’ holds all too often true.
– Clive Murphy
Clive’s cat ‘Joan’ in his kitchen, 6th July 1996
Mustakim and Joan, 11th April 1998
Joan on the rooftops of Brick Lane, 21st February 1996
Mullah’s pupil with Joan, 10th April 2001
15th June 1995
Photographs copyright © Clive Murphy
You may like to read my other stories about Joan Lauder
Remembering the Cat Lady of Spitalfields
and take a look at my other stories about Clive Murphy
The Metropolitan Machinists’ Co, 1905
A few weeks ago – courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute – I published the 1896 cycling accessories catalogue of the Metropolitan Machinists’ Co of Bishopsgate Without and today I publish their catalogue from 1906 as an illustration of how rapidly cycling advanced into the new century, especially – as you will see – in the applied science of the ‘Anatomical Saddle’ which offered extra support to the ischial tuberosities.
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You may also like to take a look at
The Metropolitan Machinists’ Co, 1896
