An ambitious project led by The Building Exploratory has assembled a continuous photographic montage of the A11 emerging from the City as Whitechapel Road, becoming the Mile End Road and then Bow Road over 6km in a straight line.

The entirety of both sides of the road can be viewed on the dedicated website panoramaeast.org.uk through which you can search for addresses and see commentary about the use and history of buildings, and vote for favourites.

The project was assembled by an army of volunteers and launched at an exhibition in Whitechapel in 2012. Piecing together a street frontage is a common urban design method, but this project lifts the concept to another level of sophistication, identifying each building, each block, the public buildings, the gaps, the preserved and redeveloped, the ordinary and the grand over a vast distance.

The major arterial roads radiate from central London connecting the regions. After the river Thames, and the big parks, these ancient arterial roads are fundamental structuring elements of London, the framework for the urban geography of greater London – and its biggest public spaces.

The A11 pumps traffic and goods along this canyon of building between the city and East Anglia. Spatially it is contradictory – on one hand a rough outer edge of local neighbourhoods like a rind; on the other, the focus for intense local trade and public life – the exposed face of local neighbourhoods where people gravitate for trade and services. This vast photograph shows how character changes as location, land use and the space of the road evolves along the route.

The libraries, places of worship, cafes and markets serve the needs of a local population; the workshops and wholesalers represent the community as producers, while petrol stations, and retail warehouses serve the transient road users.

The most immediate delight is seeing the architecture of individual buildings – how they convey their purpose and how they present themselves to the public thoroughfare. Then patterns of land use emerge, business types, centres of public activity, places for learning, worship, healing. The surprise lies in the linear narrative, the dramatic variety and juxtaposition of building types, the adaptation to new purposes and the number of new buildings. Then the ordering of plot sizes, and the frequency of road turnings into the local hinterland becomes interesting. Narrow plots shoved up together in Whitechapel, new depots set back from the road towards Bow.

This sustained photographic work presents a rich resource of buildings and land uses offering great scope for learning and teaching, and a visual evidence base for several kinds of urban research. In time the website could offer more commentary on the architecture of new buildings, the combined uses taking place in the buildings and the signs of adaptation.

American urban sociologist Richard Sennett has a residence in Whitechapel and this photographic project reflects his account of the shifting economy of streets and the interaction of layered uses in his book The Conscience of the Eye.

http://www.buildingexploratory.org.uk/projects/#peoplespanorama

Up and down Whitechapel High Street – photographs from the car

Susan Andrews photographed street activity along Whitechapel Road out of her car window.

In 1964 Donald Appleyard in The View from the Road said “The modern car interposes a filter between the driver and the world she is moving through. Sounds, smells, sensations of touch, and weather are all diluted in comparison with what the pedestrian experiences.’

In Susan Andrews’ photographs, there is nothing about her car, driving, or diluted experience – this is simply a novel viewpoint, taking advantage of slow rush-hour traffic. She exploits this view from the road to reveal Whitechapel Road as a busy pedestrian realm, a place of constant, enriching interaction.

The photographs from the car look head-on at the building faces and side-on to pedestrian activity, a view you don’t get from the pavement. But in the car ‘subjects are quietly observed from a distance’ says Andrews; you don’t meet the eye of passers by.

These photos are entirely different from the in-your-face street photography of Klein and Winogrand; Andrews respects the distance, while exposing intimacies, glimpsing the personal. These pictures are full of positive energy derived from the differences of people and purpose, constant encounters between friends and strangers on the street.

Jane Jacobs said: ‘the tolerance, the room for great differences among neighbours – differences that often go far deeper than differences in colour …. are possible and normal only when streets of great cities have built-in equipment allowing strangers to dwell in peace together on civilized but essentially dignified and reserved terms.’

These street photographs are entirely opposite to Meyerovitch’s picture of a fallen man that no-one helps. They are more akin to Helen Levitt’s 1940s photos and Andy Grundberg’s comments on her, ‘…beautiful candid photography, done in a way that is non-aggressive, noninvasive and, one wants to say, non-macho.’

Because of Andrews’ unusual point of view, the building faces contextualise the meetings, conversations and passings by; people are seen in relation to library, surgery, housing; the marks, scuffs, signs and layers of change in the the building faces themselves part of the incident.

These pictures are superb story pictures of moment–to-moment life. She says ‘Sometimes there appears to be nothing of interest to photograph, whilst at other times I drive past something remarkable, unable to record it’. These photographs show ordinary life as full of interest, full of inconsequential coincidence. And these incidents also tell stories of physical flux – two photographs of the same spot show differences of use, street furniture graffiti with no clue as to which came first, which second.

These pictures bring out the meaning of the Whitechapel Road as public space.

http://www.eastendarchive.org/Collections/SusanAndrews.aspx

John Davies was commissioned by the Museum of London in 2001 to make 26 images of the capital’s arterial roads. Six large prints were exhibited at the Museum in 2013 – St Pancras, Mansion House, Marble Arch, the Hammersmith Ark, a north Greenwich gas holder, Elephant and Castle.

As well as being glorious pictures in their own right, they provide an intense scrutiny of the urban landscape. Davies’ photography embraces the complexity of the city with visual articulacy and open-mindedness, allowing us to read the landscape and discern the causes and effects of urbanism on local places. As Michael Wood says in A Green and Pleasant Land, ‘Each of John’s pictures tells a packed story. Tales of change, cycles of destruction and rebirth’.

In this way Davies’ photographs act as a means of visual literacy, by which we question the use and development of urban space. His photographs, explicitly about urban form, invite urban analysis. Most commentary on urban landscape is historical – sequences of dates, what has been lost, but commentary is rarely spatial – reasons for locations, juxtapositions, origins and destinations of routes, fronts and backs, function of spaces; Davies enables this.

The commission marked ten years of the congestion charge; more significant however is that the pictures are shown ten years after the 2002 publication of the London Plan by the new mayor and GLA, identifying key growth areas, including the Elephant & Castle.

Despite being entitled Highways, It is soon evident that the real content of these photographs is the local places the big roads animate or devastate. Davies’ photographs are a kind of land use mapping, telling us something about the location and life of a place – housing, parks, shops, road turnings, depot, car park, service yard; either ordered and stable, or crashed together, provisional, messy. The topographic photograph gives all content equal attention, both grand and bland; therefore a shed on a terrace roof top claims the same status as Erskine’s Ark; and the ephemeral hand written signs, street stalls, burger van, wear and tear become as significant as the architecture.

A photograph always only shows part of the urban whole – we don’t see the spatial connections beyond the frame. We don’t see what’s hidden within the frame – the Heygate estate behind the Elephant shopping centre, Somerstown behind St Pancras. The meaning of all the six exhibited images revolves around invisible underground functions – major tube interchanges, a river tunnel, Park Lane car park. And of course, in a photograph, the vociferous campaigning around these places is unheard.

Inferred connections enable us to partly construct the wider city morphology, helped by Davies’ elevated vantage points. And we can also infer the territorial claims made by City institutions, the Crown estate, transport policy, housing regeneration politics, spatial funding, property investors. Davies offers the chance to see, piece together and decipher the city.

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This blog looks at photographs of urban places and asks ‘What do we we see?’

All photographs are a mixture of visual fact and photographer’s art, but I want to look closely at the physical subject matter of the pictures: the buildings and spaces, the signs of urban life – what the photographer shows us, what we actually see and what it says about a place.

Photography intensifies reality, gives all details a significance. We are familiar with the idea of reading guidebooks and maps; this is about reading photographs to gain insights about urban places.

In the 1930s, the architect Harry Goodhart-Rendel observed that: ‘The modern architectural drawing is interesting, the photograph is magnificent, the building is an unfortunate but necessary stage between the two’ – quoted by Jonathan Meades in his book Museum without Walls.

Roger Estop