The changing metropolis, earliest photographs of London 1839-1879

The Changing Metropolis: Earliest Photographs of London 1839-1879

By Gavin Stamp. 240pp. (Viking, £14.95)

London was far from the ideal city in which to show off the startling novelty of the art of photography. When M. de St. Croix gave the first public demonstration of Daguerre's new process. in Piccadilly on September 13th, 1839, the daguerreotype itself was less than a month old but London was on the verge of yet another winter of the wholesale burning of its traditional fuel, coal. St. Croix's 'exquisite mezzotints' (to quote the Times ) clearly marked a shift in the way early Victorians looked at ways of representing themselves and their cities. Although these early sun pictures reversed images and formed unique artefacts, they merit not simply a technological leap but a new dimension in seeing. At the beginning of the century Wordsworth had proclaimed the singular beauty of London glimpsed in the smokeless morning light; he must have been fortunate in the weather. As many of the superb early photographs of the city in the 1840s and 50s collected by Gavin Stamp suggest, London was more often than not obscured by a yellow haze. Unlike Paris, which burnt wood, London's vistas were blurred less in the manner of a mezzotint than by the impressionist tog of Bleak Ho use.

The Changing Metropolis is a book of major importance to students of London history and to those drawn to London by its physical presence in Victorian art and literature. This book not only assembles an extraordinary wealth of formerly unknown photographs, it also offers a distinguished and informed commentary on each of the 211 illustrations. Pictures are dated as scrupulously as possible and the enigmas with which they are likely to present modern viewers are impressively solved. Here is London as the great Regency redevelopers left it, but it is also a capital gradually proclaiming the style and assertion of a new age. A series of remarkable pictures record the changing riverfront, the rise and fall of bridges and markets, and the slow emergence of the new Palace of Westminster and its ancillary courts and squares. Later images recall further radical changes like the Embankment, the new railway stations, the underground, and the construction of Holborn Viaduct as a triumph of new engineering as an adjunct to urban planning. Dr Stamp concludes his introduction to his visual survey with the melancholy confession that 'almost every change that has taken place since these pioneer days of photography has been change for the worse'. The 'changing metropolis' of his book gives us the London that advanced Victorians found dingy and muddled but which now seems to us strangely beautiful, marked as it is as much by the traces of horses as by Mr Podsnap's evidences of the British Constitution.