CARITA SILANDER

London Archive Essay | Woolwich Common, SE18

9/6/2021

I had gone to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlton with Milo as a part of the Lockdown Trails subproject. Milo makes people smile, especially when he starts to roll on the grass. The boy knows how to have a good time. When we got to the hospital, he did just that, rolled on the green grass and stayed there, on his back, and his paws towards the sky, looking at me with his tail waving and a silly grin on his handsome face. He then wanted to say hello to a man who, judging by his uniform, I took to be a nurse or a doctor. The man told me that he had just lost his dog and he thought he wouldn’t be able to get another. ‘But maybe I will, maybe I will’ he said, giving Milo a belly rub.

It had been one of those days of the late spring that already smelled like summer. After the insecurity of coldness, which is present in all the efforts to stay warm and cosy, the fresh, gentle air felt like hope.

I guess that is what I photographed when I took this shot. Hope. I saw it in that warm shade of blue of the sky and the glow on that barren, pale bark of the tree.

I looked up the location of this photograph afterwards. I stood on the pavement, next to the hospital. On the other side of the road was Woolwich Common, towards which the lens was turned. This image would then be of Woolwich Common.

What do I think of when I think of Woolwich? A peripheral, large area that is not terribly safe or nice. A bit grim, to be frank. The local news often reports about crime. I have been to the council building to get parking permits as well as to the new library. My flatmate went there because, back then, the closest Wilko to us was in Woolwich. She wanted to get some soil to repot her plants. There are lots of new buildings by the river. A ferry. The high street like any other small-town high street in the UK. The same shops, from Clarks shoes to Specsavers. Some Victorian buildings with their carved stone signs in the centre that always surprise me. Once I fell asleep on a night bus after a fun, wine-filled night in town, and ended up in Woolwich. It rained and I remember it being hazy grey. I was drunk and tired. I felt like crying when trying to find the right bus stop, which I eventually did, after a length of time that in my state felt dramatically long. That said though, I have found the streets there confusing and been waiting on the wrong bus stop even when I have been sober in the daytime.

I also remember going past the old Royal Herbert Hospital building on Shooters Hill Road, now in residential use, and the woodlands nearby on a bus a long time ago. The scenery was such a surprise and the impression of the commanding frontage stayed in my mind for a long time. My research tells me that it was the first military hospital in England, and it was built following the health reforms campaigned by Florence Nightingale in the late 19th century.

Much of Woolwich’s past has to do with the military. There was the Royal Dockyard, one of the most important shipyards in the 17th century. The Royal Artillery Barracks is a commanding sight and still in use. There is the Royal Arsenal Heritage site which is also the starting point to a self-guided historic walk. The King’s Troops (horses) were relocated in the area recently and can sometimes be seen walking on Blackheath.

Woolwich Common is also linked to this military heritage. The locals used it as a pastureland for their cattle, for collecting wood for fuel and building material as well as for turf-cutting for fuel until the 18th century. The land was then owned by the Crown, being part of the manor of Eltham. From the 1720’s onwards the land began to be used for military purposes, like artillery practice, and at the beginning of the 19th century, the Crown sold it to the Military. During WW1 the northern edge of the Common was the site of the Signals Experimental Establishment which experimented in wireless telegraphy as well as produced communication mechanics for the military. The work and the experiments continued after WW1. From 1949 it was used for the early developmental work for Blue Danube, Britain’s first atomic bomb. The establishment closed in 1963 after being deemed uneconomic. A more recent entry to the happenings of the Common is the grass fire in July 2018 which took 125 firemen to tackle.

Woolwich Common is still owned by the Ministry of Defence but is in public use.

I haven’t had many reasons to go to Woolwich and the ones that I have had, I haven’t relished. When the time comes to repot my plants, I will be going to the Wilko in Lewisham or Charlton, not in Woolwich. However, this ill feeling towards Woolwich might have just changed. One of the clicks during my online research led me St George’s Garrison Church site, next to the Royal Artillery Barracks. It was opened in 1863 and was badly damaged by bombing in WW2. It is currently being restored. There is something about these kinds of projects that I find captivating. Both the grandness and the destruction of the past are visible and incorporated in the contemporary constructs of restoration. They are incomplete and imperfect, and thus honest as a symbol of healing in a community. In these kinds of places, I feel something similar to hope.

'Nelson' on the stocks on the Woolwich Dockyard. Engraving, 1815

Launch of the 'Royal Albert' screw steamer from Royal Dockyard, Woolwich. Lithograph, 1854

The 474 electric tram to Woolwich Road. Photograph, 1907

Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. Aquatint, 1821. Images courtesy of the London Picture Archive.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING:

https://friendsofwoolwichcommon.org.uk/history/
http://www.royalherbert.co.uk/history.php
https://www.stgeorgeswoolwich.org
https://www.londonpicturearchive.org.uk/

London Archive Essay | University College Hospital, NW1

13/5/2021

The weather forecast promised a fine, warm day. I got up early, drank a cup of coffee and packed my gear. I walked through the Greenwich Tunnel to the other side of the Thames, Island Gardens and the closest Santander Bikes spot. The temperature drops considerably inside the tunnel, and I looked forward to start pedalling on the bike to warm up. It was my first time riding a bicycle in London. The sense of freedom I first felt changed into wariness as soon as I had to cross the street next to cars and trucks. I felt relieved when I got to the cycle super highway, not only because I felt less exposed but also because it is painted turquoise blue. I thought to myself that it was almost like cycling in the sea (there rarely is a dull moment for anyone with an imagination like mine) I docked the bike along Victoria Embankment, close to Charing Cross, and continued on foot, through empty London.

There are certain places in London that evoke personal as well as what I call secondary memories, conjured up from old photographs and film footage from a time before I was born. I have seen images of Piccadilly Circus, for example, before visiting it myself and formed an idea of it and the kind of London it portrays. I walked through Piccadilly Circus now and remembered the several times being stuck in a bus there, only moving a metre or two at a time. I recalled the times I had walked through it on my way to walk to Carnaby Street at a similar hour, sharing the pavement with both people on their way back from night clubs and those, like me, on their way to work in hospitality. That morning PIccadilly Circus was eerily desolate. I looked at its neon signs, a somewhat dated but famous sight in London, now displaying messages of resilience and courage and remembered the black and white photographs I had seen of it. It is bizarre to feel nostalgia for something I have no immediate experience of.

It was close to 9am when I got to the University College Hospital. I admired the range of blues, mint, and turquoise, the reflection of the glass, the horizontal and vertical lines, and the triangular shape over the front doors. It is a serene sight. People went in and out of the front doors; some, after seeing me with my camera across the road, hurried away, whether out of politeness towards me or because they didn’t wish to be photographed, a sentiment that I share and respect. I struggled to compose the image so that all the lines were straight and only almost succeeded — my beloved Rolleiflex distorts the view noticeably from some angles.

University College Hospital is a teaching hospital in Bloomsbury, founded as North London Hospital in 1834. In 1906 it moved to a new site on Gower Street, Cruciform building, designed by Alfred Waterhouse. Waterhouse is also the architect of the Natural History Museum among other Victorian Gothic buildings of the era. The Cruciform Building was bought by UCL after its use as a hospital came to an end in 1995. The new hospital, the one in my photograph, was designed by Llewelyn Davies Yeang and opened in 2005.

Given the title and setting of this series, ‘Lockdown Trails’, I feel the pressure to write about the pandemic, or at least about a personal account of self-isolation. However, there is nothing interesting for the reader in the latter and I am unqualified to write about the former. All that I can humbly say is that we are indebted to medical science and its break throughs. In that spirit, to honour the medical profession, I searched images of London’s bygone and present hospitals. The number of hospitals there have been is overwhelming. I have chosen a selection of images for this post and I highly recommend going to London Picture Archive’s website to see more.

Smallpox hospital, Euston Road. Engraving, 1771

Chelsea Royal Hospital. Coloured engraving, 1700s

St Thomas Hospital, Southwark, moved to Lambeth in 1862 when the area was acquired for the site of London Bridge station. Engraving, c1825

View of St Bartholomew's Chapel, Hackney. The chapel was part of a leper hospital known as the Lock Hospital. Engraving, c1830

View of Greenwich Hospital across the Thames. The Royal Naval Hospital, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, was built in the 1690s, using the Queen's House as a centre point. The hospital was closed in 1869 and re-opened in 1873 as the Royal Naval College. Engraving, 1814

Smallpox hospital ship: Joyce Green Hospital, Dartford. Photograph.

St George's Hospital, Westminster. Photograph, 1912

St George's Hospital, Westminster. Photograph, 1985

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/wolfson-institute-biomedical-research/cruciform-building
https://www.e-architect.com/london/university-college-hospital
https://footprintsoflondon.com/2020/03/viruses-plague-and-diseases-in-london/
https://wellcomecollection.org
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/health/2020/05/peak
https://www.londonpicturearchive.org.uk/

London Archive Essay | By Vauxhall Bridge, SW1

7/5/2021

This photo is taken by the Riverwalk building on Millbank, looking at the office buildings across the river in Vauxhall. It is not an area that I know very well despite having gone through it every week on the 436 bus from Camberwell to Victoria during my university days. I do have a few painful memories, though, of wandering about somewhere around there, surrounded by those high, sleek office buildings and luxury appartements. Why exactly had I gone there, I can’t remember — perhaps having said to myself ‘it can’t be that far’ and ‘I will just cross over here’. Thus, having performed one of my most common errors of judgement, my blood sugar levels plummeted, unleashing the Existential Crisis I have taken disciplined measures to keep at bay. I eventually returned home in the frame of mind of a sobbing child.

Like most of London, the riverbanks on both sides of Vauxhall Bridge have had several metamorphoses over the centuries. Today the south bank is dominated, at least visually, by office buildings, some of which have been converted into flats, like the Tintagel House which can be seen in my photograph. Behind these office buildings runs one of London’s Victorian engineering feats, the Albert Embankment. It was built in the 1860s — at the same time as its counterpart, Victoria Embankment, north of the river — on a riverside road called Fore Street. Because of that, most of the buildings along that street were demolished. Among the businesses that presided there pre-1860 were pubs, chalk manufacturers, a bone merchant, boat builders and a few distilleries. London Picture Archive (LPA) has a photograph, dated 1870, of Guy Fawkes’s Mansion on Upper Fore Street. Despite the name, Mr Fawkes didn’t ever live there although the mansion was used as a base and storage for the Gunpowder Plot in 1605.

A click on the yellow dot on the northside of the Thames on thw LPA website led to a discovery of the shipbreaking industry, a fascinating chapter in the British naval history; the site of the current Riverside building used to be occupied by Castle Shipbreaking Yard. The industry boomed in the 19th century when, as the warship building and artillery developed, the Navy moved from wooden warships to iron or steel armoured ones, known as broadside ironclads, with steam-powered propulsion. There were enough wooden ships for the industry to trade until the 1930s.

As the name suggests, the shipbreaking yards broke wooden and later armoured vessels and sold the timber to be recycled, for example, as material for garden furniture manufacturing. The Castle’s also manufactured furniture themselves using the timber from the broken vessels. Baltic Wharf, as the north bank next to Vauxhall Bridge was then called, was the Castle shipbreaking family’s home and business site for almost 100 years, from 1843 to 1941. They also had a wharf in Woolwich. Baltic Wharf was hit by bombs during the Blitz and was almost completely destroyed.

Whenever I talk about my work, I feel that I am only able to point out the obvious. This is not surprising: to photograph is to point out, by focusing the lens — the attention of the mechanical eye — onto something; to single it out, frame it, and then capture it. Or to shoot it, to use some of the more aggressive terminology of photography. Once this object or a view is taken out of its context in real life, its meaning changes. It becomes a subject of an image and a charged one as such. Therefore, when presenting a photograph in my capacity as an artist, I also state that something, either the photograph itself as an object or at least its subject matter, is of high value. This is the great conundrum and one’s success in the Art World depends on how convincing one is able to be.

But nothing is really that obvious. What I see depends on various things: my past experiences, aspirations, mood etc. An image of a high office building brings different associations to my mind than it does to others, even if there is something called collective consciousness, a zeitgeist. We might be looking at the same view but see a different one.

Most of my photographs are sums of chances. How much depth and meaning can there be in a chance? And if there is, is it visible on the photograph?

I hadn’t planned to stop by Vauxhall Bridge. I had been out walking and photographing since the morning and had already called it day. However, I missed a bus in Pimlico and instead of waiting for the next one in 16 minutes, I decided to walk to Westminster.

By the time I got to the bridge, the blue hour had come. I tend to get a bit restless when I know that there are photographs to be found, no matter how tired I am. That afternoon felt heavy. The view was shimmery, like steel. Stormy greys, mint-coloured reflections, and clouds like blue powder. Rain was imminent. There was also a kind of blankness, that is the best way I can describe it. It looked like the generic cityscape I had seen on American TV-shows when I was younger — it is odd how the scenery of those sitcoms has stuck in my mind — and distinctively not like the London I knew. That is why I took this photograph: the view appeared familiar and unobvious at the same time.

The aforementioned Guy Fawkes Mansion on Upper Fore Street. The street and the mansion were demolished under the way of the Albert Embankment. Photograph, 1870.

A view of Albert Embankment from Broad Street (no longer extant). Photograph, 1909

Office buildings on Albert Embankment. Photograph, 1970

A building in construction on Albert Embankment. Photograph, 1956

A ship's figureheads by the entrance of the Castle Shipbreaking Yard, Baltic Wharf. Area much altered since. Photograph, 1900s

Castles Shipbreaking Yard, Baltic Wharf. Photograph, early 1900s.

H.M.S Alexandra at Castles Shipbreaking Yard, Baltic Wharf. Photograph, early 1900s. Images courtesy of London Picture Archive

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING:
https://castlesshipbreaking.co.uk
http://edithsstreets.blogspot.com/2016/03/riverside-west-of-tower-south-bank.html
https://vauxhallhistory.org
https://www.londonpicturearchive.org.uk

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London Archive Essay | Woolwich Common, SE18

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