What's so special?

Your blogger was, today, searching for useful data on Rochford's, the former Lea Valley nurseries at Cheshunt.  For a sizeable company, which many of us remember for its house plants, but was equally well-known in earlier times for its exotic fruit and salad crops, there is comparatively little in the way of written history or photographs.  The huge estate of glasshouses was demolished in the 1960s when  the Greater London Council purchased the site for housing.  Today, residual collections of images are probably restricted to personal collections, a topic which has appeared on this blog previously.

Kingshill Avenue 2014

Burleigh Road 2014

From our neck of the woods here are two photos chosen at random.  Are you are impressed with my restricted selection?  While you consider, here are two further images, the first, a print, from the late 19th century, and the second from just before the First World War.

Print now surviving as a photo

c1910 photo of part of Sutton Road

The impressive shop front represents much from this period; no doubt this print was intended for newspaper reproduction.  But it was also a time when photography was as much to do with people as places; the new paintings, much as MP3s are the new CDs in music.  The fact that few pics from the period remain is because relatively few were taken.  The cost of a photograph was expensive, and certainly beyond the range of ordinary people.

Printed postcard photos became very popular in the early 20th century; even today most of us will probably know at least one collector of early 20th century postcard photos and his/her batteries of boxes containing treasures of the period.  We therefore have a much more familiar view of our home district as it was in the 1910s and 20s than either earlier or later until more recent times which are within our memory.  We develop an emotional attachment to them, and once seen we crave to discover more – hence the popularity of various "then and now" books.

So, what happened after the 1920s?  It's a bit of a mixed bag, of course.  It's the period of developing personal photography, so there are masses of tourist pictures, but there is less balance in the range of places and people photographed, and more importantly, retained.

Aware of the risk of unspeakable damage to landscapes and buildings during World War Two, a number of  artists were commissioned to record urban and rural landscapes at risk from 1939 and though the forties.  Thank goodness for the Recording Britain project, now in the V&A Archive; an   exhibition is currently touring Britain.  A similar project on shopping streets in St Albans was commissioned in 1964, as a record of vulnerable city streetscapes of the period.

Demolition of 9 and 11 College Road

Now, let's return to those first two photos.  They are a fairly common sight; typical residential street scenes.  If we live nearby we will see them on most days.  So, why keep something so ordinary?  The point seems to be, that in 50, 75 or 100 years, what will those scenes look like?  Will the houses still be there?  How will the roadway have changed?  Will we be surprised that the streets seem empty?  If we don't maintain a record of our environment we won't be able to fill in the detail later.  As an early supermarket once proclaimed, "when it's gone, it's gone."

Let us, therefore record our local areas, the little details, the unusual, the ordinary, or the just-in-time, as in this final picture.  And let us grab our photo boxes to see what we can find and which might be a valuable resource for all of us now, and for those who come after us.