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I shot these for my Mum to remind her of home. She grew up in Fulham. It’s a very different place now but Hammersmith Bridge is still as beautiful as it was when she first would have ventured across it in the late 40s.
I had the privilege of working at Action on Disability‘s youth scheme on this piece. They invite young people with disabilities to come and take part in all sorts of accessible sports and activities such as dance, theatre and music during school holidays. I had a fantastic time working on this with them, from drawing the designs, making the stencils, to teaching them a bit of can control. The young people also taught me the Candy Step while I was there, so I no longer have to be the white bloke in the corner looking awkward at parties!
While cycling at night down a West London back street I watch a man purposefully emerge out of the darkness of a bridge. He walks down the middle of the road staring ahead into the distance, he is aiming for the centre of a mini roundabout. He mounts the white circle and stopping dead centre kneels down on one knee placing his hands by his sides like a sprinter on the starting blocks. He fixes his gaze on the road ahead and waits. He doesn’t even seem to notice me cycle slowly by him, he is fixed on his target. I will never know what this is or what happened next.
It’s midnight, a man sits on a bench on Starch Green, a patch of grass by a roundabout. He nurses a can of Special Brew, a blue bag sits at his feet containing a collection of more cans. He is lit softly from behind by a streetlamp creating a golden halo like the Ready brek kid. He stares ahead at the centre of the green which has of flock of discarded blue bags haunting it, dancing and twisting around in the breeze. There is a bright and almost full moon which gently illuminates the first daffodils of the year as they take their first tentative reaches out of the ground. He studies them with suspicion as if wondering how on earth they got there and what they wanted.
This is a photograph I did take in a disconnected scene but which reminded me of the moment:
The shadows of human history lay heavy on these buildings. The Soup Kitchen fed the poor and needy for 90 years. It’s luxury apartments are now, I’m sure, a quaint place to live and the more subtly named food banks have taken on the mission. The Sheltering home ‘rescued’ over 6,000 destitute and neglected children, trained them and then packed them off to work on farms in Canada. It now shelters University students from around the world in a reversal of its role.
The Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor, Brune St, East End of London
The Sheltering Home for Destitute Children, Myrtle St, Liverpool
Overlaid are Frank Bray, Samuel Relf and Edith Barker, three of the children who left for a new life in Canada.
“We in England, with our 470 inhabitants to the square mile, were choking, elbowing, starving each other in the struggle for existence: the British colonies over seas were crying out for men to till their lands, with few ties to bind them to the mother country, and at an age when they were easily adaptable to almost any climatic extremes.”
Thomas Barnardo 1889
“For all the noble endeavour of institutions, one vital ingredient is always missing. There is, and never will be, a substitute for love.” John Lane – Liverpudlian Child Migrant
Source: The Merseyside Maritime Museum