BY VAUXHALL BRIDGE, SW1
London Archive Chronicles
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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 the 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. (Originally published 07.05.2021) |
© Carita Silander
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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.
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A view of Albert Embankment from Broad Street (no longer extant). Photograph, 1909
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Office buildings on Albert Embankment. Photograph, 1970
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A building in construction on Albert Embankment. Photograph, 1956
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A ship's figureheads by the entrance of the Castle Shipbreaking Yard, Baltic Wharf. Area much altered since. Photograph, 1900s
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Castles Shipbreaking Yard, Baltic Wharf. Photograph, early 1900s.
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H.M.S Alexandra at Castles Shipbreaking Yard, Baltic Wharf. Photograph, early 1900s. Images courtesy of London Picture Archive
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