London Street Photography By Matilda Battersby

 An extraordinary collection of street photography will open to the public at the Museum of London from tomorrow.

Showcasing snaps dating from 1860 right up to the present day, the collection captures ordinary people going about their day lives in the street.

                                   © Paul Trevor. All rights reserved/ Courtesy Museum of London

Brick Lane, E1, 1978 - Brick Lane was a notorious political flashpoint in 1970s London because of National Front aggression against the Bangladeshi community living there.

                                   © Paul Trevor. All rights reserved/ Courtesy Museum of London

                                                              Prusom Street, E1, 1973

                                                 © Bob Tapper/ Courtesy Museum of London

                                Fieldgate Mansions, Whitechapel, February 1986  

                                               © David Gibson/ Courtesy Museum of London

                                           Audition 2008, David Gibson

                             © Stephen McLaren/ Courtesy Museum of London

                                              Dog, Big Ben, April 2007

 

 From dirty-faced street urchins and corseted magazine sellers in the 19th Century, to skinheads and hippies in the Seventies, the photographs produce striking messages about the times in which they were taken.

 Images of police intervening in tension between the National Front and Brick Lane’s Bangladeshi community in the 1970s are juxtaposed with racial integration, and relationships, in Portabello Road’s ‘Piss House Pub’ – the local name for the pub on the corner of Blenheim Crescent – in 1968.

 Highlights include David Gibson’s 2008 photograph ‘Audition’, which captures a gaggle of sequin-clad little girls waiting impatiently of their turn. While Mimi Mollica’s ‘Homeless, 1997’ shows the contrast between the lives advertised to us on billboards and the reality, the sleeping impoverished, whom we daily walk by.

 ‘London Street Photography’ opens tomorrow until 4 September 2011 at Museum of London, museumoflondon.org.uk

©independent.co.uk