Going Underground

By shendy1 Comment
These are Piccadilly Circus and Hyde Park Corner tube stations, from February 1958. In so many ways, these look pretty much as they do today. The second one is remarkable in that there's no-one else there - when did you last see an empty tube station? The advert in the first one caught my eye - "We Want Watney's Brown Ale". From what I understand, it was a reasonable brew in those days, long before the dreaded Watney's Red Barrel and Party Seven....
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Skiffle Group

By shendyNo Comments
August 1957, and some sort of street fair in Soho, with a skiffle group playing in the street - you can tell it's skiffle because someone is playing a tea chest. Even if you wanted one and could afford one, you weren't allowed to use a proper bass - it had to be the piece of string attached to a tea chest. It's in the rules of the International Skiffle Federation - look it up if you don't believe me....
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"Morphy Day, General Melee"

By shendyNo Comments
November 1955, on the footpath of the ThamesA bit of digging on t'interweb reveals that Morphy Day traditionally consisted of various bits of Imperial College (which was made up of the Royal College of Science, the City & Guilds College and the Royal School of Mines) having a flour and tomato fight on the towpath at Putney whilst the Morphy and the Lowry races took place between the three colleges on the river. Somehow I suspect the rowing wasn't the most important bit of the day......
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Coronation, 1953

By shendyNo Comments
Westminster Abbey   Whitehall & Houses of Parliament   Piccadilly Circus A special bonus of three images this time, to round off the detour back into the really old 40's and early 50's stuff, before my dad had his own camera. I think these "half-plate" shots were taken on his mum's camera - I seem to recall him saying that he borrowed hers for the cycling trip to France. I have also just looked through another set of "half-plate" sized negatives that I brought back the other week, and these look even older. It looks like one of the associated prints is dated 1920, so these will presumably have been taken by my grandfather, or maybe even his father. There must be getting on towards 100 of them, so that's ramped up my scanning a bit more! Anyway, these three images are, as the title of the posting says, from around the time of the Coronation in 1953. I'm not quite sure what everyone is queueing for...
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