Capturing Real Life: 27 Brilliant Photographs Reflect Working-Class Life on the Streets of the U.K. in the Post-war Era

27 Brilliant Photographs Capture Working-Class Life on the Streets of the U.K in the Post-war Era

Roger Mayne was one of the outstanding British photographers of the postwar period. He is best known as the photographic poet of London’s dynamic street life in the then dilapidated area of Notting Dale in North Kensington. He photographed one street – Southam Street – from 1956 until it was demolished in 1961 to make way for Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower.

Using a Zeiss Super Ikonta camera, rather than a Leica, Mayne visited Southam Street 27 times between 1956 and 1961, harvesting around 1,400 negatives. His photographs touched a nerve, drawing praise from key writers of the period such as Colin MacInnes – whose Absolute Beginners (1959) carried a Mayne photograph on its dust jacket – and the architect Theo Crosby, who published 57 of the photographs as an issue of Uppercase magazine in 1961. These timely, punchy photographs also appeared on the covers of important Penguin and Pelican books and such classics as Peter and Iona Opie’s The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959).