The YouTube stroll around Farringdon Street and Smithfield Market seems to have brought back memories for those of you who walked those paths a half-century ago. Adrian Young sent us, all the way from Canberra, Australia, a selection of photos taken during his time in the Graphic Design Studio in the early 1970s, where he made memorable use of Govt supplies and time to construct a successful pinhole camera.
Saffron Hill from Atlantic House, taken 27 June 1972, pin-hole camera, 45 minutes exposure.
Charterhouse Street, from Atlantic House, 28 June 1972, pin-hole camera, 25 mins exposure, sunny day
Regular buskers outside Farringdon Underground Station, Cowcross Street
December 1970, George Hammond, Philip Marriage, Mick Kenyon (owner), Nodge Carnegie and Roger, at Coroscan, suppliers of letterpress repro typesetting
George Hammond, John Saville (just visible behind Mick Kenyon) and David Challis on the right inspecting hot-metal typesetting
Not sure where this was taken.
ALF’s confectioners and tobacconists
The beloved book barrows top of Farringdon Road near the junction with Clerkenwell Road.
Philip Marriage adds: Believe it or not I had that pin-hole camera, made by Adrian fifty years ago, in my loft until a year or two back – now in a recycling centre in the sky!
It was made of cardboard and covered in a buckram bookbinding cloth and quite big, maybe two and a half feet long and designed to take 10 x 8 ins photographic paper which had to be inserted in a dark-room before exposure.
I recall one lunchtime we took it to a nearby green space – may well have been Staple Inn – and set it up to take a long exposure only to be spotted midway and escorted out by a jobsworth park-keeper.
I also found in the archive this view taken from Atlantic House, looking up Charterhouse Street, past Ely Place, towards the (then) Daily Mirror building.
This 1974 view from Atlantic House across the rooftops shows St Sepulchre Holborn on the corner of Shoe Lane on the right, with the top of the spire of Christ Church Greyfriars on the left.
Two more views of Saffron Hill, in 1974, still looking murky and forbidding even on a sunny day.
Two years later, 1976, and change underway with the buildings in Charterhouse Street being demolished and the inexorable process of redevelopment begins.
And finally, this sunny 1977 view from near the Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street, looking up to Ludgate Hill and St Paul’s Cathedral.
Ah, the book barrows – Bernard O’Brien must have been late that day. Slow men working – they knew (insert names) from Atlantic then. Reg.