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This collection o photographs owes its o rigin to

the imminent demolition o a London inn, and

the oresight o a group o riends who wished

to preserve a record o it. Thus, the Society or

Photographing Relics o Old London was ormed,and photography hurriedly commissioned when the

Oxord Arms, a galleried building near St. Paul’s

Cathedral, was about to be demolished to make way

or the expansion o the Old Bailey in 1875.

Prompted by the enthusiasm with which this

photographic campaign was received and with

encouragement rom G.H. Birch, architect and

curator o The Sir John Soane’s Museum, and the

painter Henry Stacy Marks RA, the Society decided

to produce an annual photographic record o 

buildings under threat. This was issued rom 1875 –

1886. To accompany it, rom 1881 onwards, AlredMarks, the Society’s Honorary Secretary and brother

o H.Stacy Marks, wrote a descriptive text providing

a historical background to each o the buildings.

The Society or Photographing Relics o Old

London represents one o the earliest o a series o 

coordinated eorts in Britain to use photography

to survey and record the architecture o a district

threatened with urban change. In Scotland, in 1868,

the Glasgow City Improvement Trust had employed

the photographer Thomas Annan to document the

city’s old ‘closes’, and in Birmingham, in 1875, James

Burgoyne provided photographs or the Birmingham

Improvement Scheme. However, both o these were

municipal schemes, their intent being to produce

images o contemporary living conditions. In 1886,the Society or Photographing Relics o Old London

reerred to its work as a “record” and although the

urgency o securing negatives sometimes prevented

a strict classication o subjects, the Society seems

to have considered its aims careully. Architecture

was to remain pre-eminent in each image throughout

the series, whether an individual structure was

being recorded or the manner in which civil and

ecclesiastical buildings were juxtaposed. Little is

evident in the photographs o the orces uelling the

wholesale redevelopment o areas o London. The

rapidly expanding population o London is reduced

to the occasional group o bystanders and only in oneview o Aldgate, does trac intrude. The commercial

and social abric o the city was the province o other

photographers such as Francis Frith (1822–1898) and

 John Thomson (1837–1921).

Initially, the Society employed Alred & John Bool

as its photographer, although Henry Dixon & Son

printed the Bools’ negatives. In 1879 Dixon and his

son, Thomas James took over the photography and,

with one exception, continued as the photographers

or the remainder o the pr oject. Alred Marks does

Relics o Old London:Photography and the spirit o the city10 February – 22 JuneThe Architecture Space, Royal Academy o Arts

The photographs are almost entirely

devoid o contemporary signiers – one

has to search or the ew social signs o the

times. Shop names and the wares that they

sell, people loitering in corners, albeit

interesting, are background details.The buildings are the primary subjects.

The past lingers in the shadows and within

the buildings whose lie has all but been

extinguished. The architecture and its

relative unction or purpose has become

detached. Alred Marks’s text reinorces

the juncture between the nineteenth-

century image o the buildings and their

history. He talks evocatively o a bygone

age oten only touching on the

contemporary with reports o the

building’s demise.

The images, however, are relevant to

London today. By photographing the

buildings – making a record to document

them – one could assert that it reed themor change. The Society’s interest was

explicitly in the buildings as ‘relics’ – ‘a

surviving memorial o something past’.

The past was preserved in photographic

memory and the buildings could be

demolished, embraced or integrated into

the city then and now as it continues

to develop.

 — Kate Goodwin

Curator, Architecture Programme,

Royal Academy o Arts

An interesting eature o Marks’s

commentaries is his requent reerences

to John Stow (c . 1525–1605) and his

Survey o London (1598). Reprinted

multiple times over the ollowing

centuries, the Survey was ramed arounda perambulation through the City’s wards,

one which the Londoner, Stow, would

have made countless times over his lie.

The Survey is littered with anecdotes,

oten lamenting the destruction o ancient

and venerable buildings. Elizabethan

London and its environs still bore the

physical and emotional scars o Henry

VIII’s suppression o the monasteries,

which Stow would have witnessed in his

youth. This legacy surely inormed Stow’s

antiquarian interests, ocused on what he

saw and born rom a deep emotional

investment in the city – an experience

quite unlike that o the detached

modern fâneur .

For Marks, Stow’s Survey was not only a

valuable source o inormation, but a great

inspiration or the recording o a city in

fux. Born into what was still a medieval

city, by the end o Stow’s long lie t he

economic, political and religious

convulsions through which London

would emerge as the world’s rst modern

city were already underway.

— Owen Hopkins

 Architecture Programme Assistant,

Royal Academy o Arts

Many o the Society’s photographs, and

presumably much o what was under

threat, were gateways and boundaries.

St John’s Gate, entrances to the Temple

and Lincoln’s Inn, and above all the

long-concealed Temple Bar whichstraddled the Strand all dened

boundaries between dierent types

o public space.

Public space itsel was being recongured.

Vast new railway stations, hotels and the

law courts changed patterns o established

activities and oered opportunities that

had not existed beore. Newly available

kerbstones protected pavements rom

street dirt making them t or

promenading and window-shopping,

while the underground world was

beginning to be used or moving people,

inormation and waste.

These changing physical boundaries mayhave had a psychological counterpart.

The mysterious, even sinister air that some

observers see in some o the photographs

may look towards the changes in mental

lie that occurred with the emergence o 

the modern metropolis, above all the

almost tangible presence o uncertainty

and ear o the unknown it represented.

— Jeremy Melvin

 Architecture Programme Consultant,

Royal Academy o Arts

Documenting Contemporary London

We encourage you to submit images which respond to London and its architecture.

In the spirit o the exhibition, consider what you think should be captured on cameraand preserved or the uture. It may be a particular building or a street scene; it may

represent something o our time or o the past; it can be personal or emblematic.

A selection will be shown in the RA adjacent to the exhibition.

For more inormation visit www.royalacademy.org.uk/architecture

or see www.fickr.com/groups/documentingcontemporarylondon

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not give any indication why this change was made,

though he does pointedly praise Henry Dixon and

his son, speaking o them as showing ‘the greatest

willingness to carry out my intentions’ and o 

being ‘prodigal o pains’. Perhaps, too, the onset o commercially available gelatin dry plates had so me

bearing on the change. By 1879, it can be assumed

that Henry Dixon had some experience o the new

plates as he is credited with writing an article in th at

year enthusiastically praising their advantages. As

their portability and sensitive emulsion would have

aided the photography o interiors, it is probably

no coincidence that a year ater Dixon & Son took

over, the Society began to include interior views

with the publication o a series o photographs o 

Charterhouse; the number o photographs per issue

also rose rom six to twelve.

Whilst Alred Marks praised the photographers’

unsparing eorts to obtain good images, oten under

trying circumstances, it is dicult to appreciate

how numerous and varied these obstacles would

have been. Interruptions o trac, insucient light,

narrowness o space, diculties o access to vantage

points, intererence rom the public and cumbersome

equipment would have been but a ew.

Both photographers created views within the

picturesque aesthetic that was to remain popular

with British photography well into the twentieth

century. On a ew occasions, views would include

domestic objects and posed gures; this is more oten

the case, it seems, in the photographs o structures

o a humbler type such as inn yards and shops. It ispossible that such views were driven by a desire to

produce images that would accord with the visual

expectations o an audience amiliar with picturesque

imagery and ascinated by the camera’s ability to

secure the transient. A balance, however, had to be

careully negotiated between the need to create an

accurate, inormative record and an image which also

invited contemplation. I the Society was conscious

o criticism o some photographs exhibited by the

Architectural Association as being o no practical use

to architects they would have been delighted when,

on 26 September 1882, a reviewer in The Times,

remarked:

The prints combine the accuracy o such work –

an accuracy hardly to be attained in the most

careul drawing – with the charm o thorou gh

and artistic treatment.

The photographs that Dixon & Son produced or the

Society’s subscribers were carbon prints, a process

which, unlike other processes o the time, does not

suer rom ading. For a society concerned with

preserving a visual record, carbon prints proved

a ortunate choice, though perhaps it is not so

remarkable given that both Henry Dixon and his son,

were active members o the Photographic Society

o Great Britain, a society much concerned with

chemical and technical improvements in photography.

As suggested by their name, the Society or

Photographing Relics o Old London’s principal

concern was with the disappearance o an older

pre-industrial London. By including buildings o a

more domestic scale the Society showed that urban

vernacular architecture was both o historic interest

and architectural merit, equally, i not more, at risk

than grander public buildings. In its short existence,

the Society’s aims remained rmly educational.

Although they successully persuaded the South

Kensington Museum to save a ceiling rom a ho use in

Bishopsgate Street and their ‘numerous and weightyprotests’ were successul in saving Ashburnham

House, they did not develop into a campaigning

body, a role that became u nnecessary, once William

Morris had ounded the Society or the Protection o 

Ancient Buildings in 1877.

The Society hoped their photographs would appeal

to persons o antiquarian taste and, particularly or

proessional reasons, to architects. It is also very

likely that they would have been o great interest

to painters as they provided such a rich source o 

authentic detail or use in historical re-creations o 

English urban scenery. Many o the photographs

show examples o Tudor or Stuart architecture. In

the mid-nineteenth century, these were periods which

were oten considered to be the most romantic inEnglish history. It is thereore hardly surprising th at,

in 1880, the historical genre painter Solomon Hart

RA, in his last ew months as the Royal Academy’s

Librarian, purchased orty-eight

o the Society’s photographs and in subsequent

years the new Librarian, John Evan Hodgson RA

completed the purchase o the ull series o 120

photographs, thus providing a valuable resource

or both the students in the Royal Academy Schools

and Royal Academicians.

When the series came to an end in 1886 Alred Marks

hoped that, ‘the work may be regarded as airlycomplete within the lines rst marked out’. For, as a

writer or The Architect on 22 May 1880 enthused:

‘The Society can do much, i it is supported, towards

cultivating the interest o the public in architecture,

and it would be dicult to discover in all England a

better investment or a guinea that it now oers to

the subscribers.’

— Pat Eaton

Curator o Photography

Royal Academy o Arts

•London’spopulationincreasessix-

old between 1801 and 1901. By the

late 1880s there are over 3.8 million

people living in London.

•EustonStation,London’srst

inter-city railway station, is opened

in 1837. It is quickly ollowed by

Paddington (1838), Fenchurch Street

(1841), Waterloo (1848), King’s

Cross (1852) and St Pancras (1863).

•ThecurrentWestminsterBridge 

is opened in 1862.

•Theworld’srstunderground

railway running rom Paddington

to Farringdon is opened in

 January 1863.

•HolbornViaduct,spanningtheFleet

River valley and Farringdon Street,

is completed in 1869.

•Blackfriarsfootandroadbridgeis

opened in 1869.

•TheEducationActof1870makes

school obligatory or all children

aged 5–13 and many new schools

are opened.

•Instigatedbythe‘GreatStink’of

1858, Joseph Bazalgette’s London

sewerage system, o which the

Victoria Embankment (1865–1870)

ormed part, is nally completed

in 1875.

•CharingCrossRoad(1877)and

Shatesbury Avenue (1886) are

developed by the Metropolitan

Boards o Works to relieve ever

growing trac congestion.

•In1891CharlesBooth’sDescriptive

Map o London Poverty 1889

is published

•Openin1865,theLanghamHotel

is the largest and most modern hotel

in London at the time, with the rst

hydraulic lits in England.

•WorkonSmitheld’sCentralMarket

(east and west buildings) begins in

1866 and is completed two years

later to the designs o Sir Horace

 Jones.

•In1867theRoyalAcademymovesto Burlington House and adds a

major suite o galleries designed

by Sydney Smirke RA which open

in 1869.

•TherebuildingoftheHousesof

Parliament to the designs o Charles

Barry RA and A. W. N. Pugin is

completed in 1870.

•TheeasternwingofSirGeorge

Gilbert Scott RA’s Midland Grand

Hotel (later St Pancras Chambers)

opens in 1873 with the rest o the

building ollowing in 1876.

•Therstpurposebuiltdepartmentstore in England, the Bon Marché in

Brixton opens in 1877.

•In1879PrudentialAssurance

Company moves to Holborn Bars

designed by Alred Waterhouse RA.

•CharlesJ.Phipps’sSavoyTheatre

opens in 1881 and is the rst public

building in the world to be lit

entirely by electric light.

•TheRoyalCourtsofJustice,

designed by George Edmund Street

RA are opened by Queen Victoria

in 1882.

•TherebuiltLeadenhallMarketin 

the City o London opens in 1882.

•TheSavoyHotelopensin1889.

Designed by Thomas Edward

Collcutt it is the rst London

hotel to have en-suite bathrooms

in every room.

19th Century Infrastructure and Social Developments London Buildings 1865 – 1889