The influential American photographer Garry Winogrand came to London a couple of times in the 1960s – there are three photos taken in London in his retrospective monograph Winogrand: Figments of the Real World. 

‘A fast-moving street photographer who delighted in the complexities, banalities and bizarreness of urban life, he used intelligence, wit and his camera in roughly equal measures to make some of the most influential and frequently imitated pictures of the 1960s.’ American Images, 1985

Garry Winogrand, London c.1967 

Winogrand took this picture of a woman in Kings Road, looking south along Walpole Street – though for him it was simply ‘London’. It is an incidental piece of London street scene framing the woman in a hurry. The road and buildings were of no consequence in themselves to him.

The first part of Walpole Street is a brick wall and a blank facade at the side of a shop facing Kings Road. It’s a supermarket – an articulated trailer with a Safeway logo is inside a loading bay. Kings Road is a local high street serving a dense neighbourhood: above the supermarket is a modernist apartment block. Beyond the loading bay and store, the side street becomes smartly residential, with a four storey terrace of houses and flats. It is a respectable solid building, with Victorian proportions, but the nearer part is a recent post-war re-building, designed to fit closely with the older original, but without the equivalent elegant refinement, without chimneys. On Kings Road, the road surface is most prominent – the white stones set within the freshly laid hot rolled asphalt, and a Zebra crossing: Kings Road is a London through-route.

The young woman is at work in the city. Neatly stylish, collar rumpled, she is dressed for the office or studio, carrying a portfolio as well as shoulder/hand bag and a capacious holdall. She is carrying an Afghan coat and wears large round glasses; conventional fashion, rather than Kings Road showiness.

Around the same time Winogrand took this picture, Ian Nairn said, ‘Chelsea is only relatively remarkable… looked at coldly, it is made up of a few pretty bits set in an unlovely mixture of the utilitarian and the genteel. The trouble is that there are no eccentric buildings to match the eccentric people. Kings Road sums up the social aorta of Chelsea perfectly: full of idiosyncratic life, yet without anything in the buildings to express it. What makes this all the more sad is that the Chelsea recipe is very exciting. It is all mixed up, with rough and smooth side by side…. The late-nineteenth century houses and studios are not much fun; the picturesqueness is applied, not instinct.’ Ian Nairn, Nairn’s London 1966