My Mother’s and Roger Mayne’s Southam Street
Lives above… and below ground
There was a trick residents of London’s Southam Street, long one of the most deprived neighborhoods in London—a stretch of broken down nineteenth century housing in North Kensington’s Kensal Town—would play on the police. A cellar ran uninterrupted the entire length of the street’s reach and they’d set up an illegal gambling den in its murk at one end or the other.
Lookouts would be posted in the street above. My grandfather was one. He lived at number 13 Southam Street along with my grandma and their eight children. This was where my mother, one of those surviving eight, was born. Should a copper or two arrive at the guilty end, undoubtedly aware of the regular goings-on, the lookout — perhaps Grandad, a man not altogether unfamiliar with petty criminality in various other respects too — would give the signal and before you knew it, the culprits down in the cavern below would have decamped to the street’s opposite extremity to evade arrest.
This was in the 1920’s and 30’s. Perhaps the ritual continued into the war years. I don’t know, but in the ’50s, Oxford graduate Roger Mayne came to the street intent on photographing working class London life. He visited 27 times in all, taking as many as 1,400 photos of the street and its inhabitants: the men, the women, the “teddy boys”, the urchins, the kids, the daily routines, the hanging around, the life and the marks and scars on the faces of those who lived it.
Number 13 was gone by then. Mum’s family were bombed out in the Blitz in 1941, none of them at home that night as providence would have it, but hunkering safely in the shelter — while my mother was over 250 miles away to the west, a child evacueé in rural Cornwall. So the family itself doesn’t show up in Mayne’s work from the following decade. My mother nevertheless recognizes several of the older faces in the photos.
Apart from a block still standing at one corner, there’s nothing left of the original street. More recent housing lines the tract remaining but most of the street, with its grand portico entrances that had once proclaimed a comfortable upper middle class community before its residences sank into sub-proletarian squalor, has more or less vanished. Only Roger Mayne’s catalogue of prints remains — testament to the fissured stucco of the street’s terracing and the correspondingly etched faces that speak so eloquently of its rundown dailiness.
Not merely testament though, because in Mayne’s vignettes and portraitures you sense strongly the pungent vibe of a defiant community, its forbearance, its insistent pulse, and its grubby swagger.
Was it this facet of London that later prompted architect Erno Goldfinger to design his brutalist Trellick Tower that stands on the site of the major stretch of Mayne’s street, demolished in 1969? Did he see it as a triumph of modernism over the city of the past? The London of Defoe, Hogarth, Dickens, of Roger Mayne? Its characters, codes, rackets, arcane lore, and sundry iniquities? Southam Street slum supplanted by high rise hubris? Hell on earth by Hades in the heavens?
James Bond author Ian Fleming loathed the concrete sarsen so comprehensively he named one of his villains Goldfinger after the architect. What a juxtaposition! The tower’s echo of its eponymous global mastermind and the ghosts of North Kensington’s down at heel working people. The garish widescreen technicolor of the movie based on Fleming’s novel presented to divert. The black and white snapshots of Mayne’s unflinching humanist vision captured to haunt.
Not that the photographer’s work was itself without its influence on movies. Distinguished cinematographer Roger Deakins has commented on the inspiration he drew from the chronicler’s canon, especially as he learned his craft, in particular through making documentaries.
You can see the rewards of this education in Martin Scorsese’s Dalai Lama story Kundun, which Deakins lit and shot with luminous mastery. In the groups. In the people. In the faces. In the heart and soul the filmmaker captures, as Mayne had. Tibet and North Kensington worlds away but humanity one living thing in each: West London/the Himalayas; Kensal Town/Lhasa; Southam Street/the Potala Palace; Mayne/Deakins.
Two artists, each revealing very different communities but both unveiling the human soul we hold in common.
It wasn’t so incongruous then, to come across these gritty West London images in Manhattan’s toney Upper East Side last year, in the form of an exhibition of the photographer’s work at the Gitterman Gallery:
Talking to Tom Gitterman about Southam Street and Roger Mayne, whom he’d met, proved a treat. There I was, in Tom’s gallery in New York City, the mortals in the frames on display now icons to fascinate his clientele. A troubled poor from one great city presiding over the exhibition’s surely considerably less poor audiences from another!
Were Mum’s lost family and their roguish stories somehow alive in that silent room, I wondered, emanating from those photographs? The swinging around the lamp post games of the street’s children. The drunkenness of Grandad, “The Madman” as he was known—a figure of both terror and puzzled love to my childhood self—and the fisticuffs and shocking violence in the home, the hurt of which I’m convinced lingers in my genes. The youngsters lost to the rank embrace of the Grand Union Canal close by. The kids who slipped from the portico tops, some surviving. My mother’s account of the day Grandad inadvertently threw his pay packet into the fire, seven year-old Mum reaching through the flames to finger its meagre bounty. “Good gel!” Grandad apparently commented with approval, as she completed the rescue.
In 1923, 2,400 people had lived in Southam Street in 140 nine-roomed houses. Not so different — and even not as overcrowded — as parts of Manhattan in times past. Preserved in gelatin silver on the walls of the gallery however, it was as if some of their successors from the 50s had arrived in New York as immigrants seeking a better life and so finally — like those crepuscular gamblers fleeing the coppers and their shrieking whistles through the shadows of that street-long cellar — escaped their fate.
Peter Markham
November 2024
Author:
- The Art of the Filmmaker: The Practical Aesthetics of the Screen (Oxford University Press) 10/23
- What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay (Focal Press/Routledge) 9/20
