black and white photography by rob gardiner.

Somewhere in Soho, London. Plaubel Makina 67. What lies beneath?

I’ve been a bit busy lately, as you may have noticed, and broken the cardinal sin of not posting often enough to my blog. Here are a couple of pictures.

Living six floors up from the ground I am not accustomed to seeing squirrels on my balcony. This inquisitive little fellow didn’t stick around for a formal portrait.

And so to the final leg of my journey around and above the surface of the 14 mile loop that is London Underground’s Circle Line. While perhaps not the final installment of the project, the circle is complete after 70 published photographs. All these photos have been taken with a primitive 4x5 pinhole camera on Polaroid 55 film, a device born in Victorian times that is little more than a tiny hole in a box.

The previous installments in my project have been

• 1st: Barbican to Moorgate
• 2nd: Moorgate to Tower Hill
• 3rd: Tower Hill to Blackfriars
• 4th: Blackfriars to Temple
• 5th: Temple to Embankment
• 6th: Embankment to St James’s Park
• 7th: St James’s Park to High Street Kensington
• 8th: High Street Kensington to Paddington
• 9th: Paddington to Baker Street
• 10th: Baker Street to Kings Cross

The area around Kings Cross is decaying rapidly, even the shops in apparently prime positions are boarded up and derelict. The wide angle of the pinhole camera turns the narrow building opposite the station into a rotten lighthouse.

The mile between Kings Cross and Farringdon stations is the least exciting mile of the entire Circle Line. Tourists tramp up the hill to the Travelodge past empty cans of beer discarded the night before, past shabby men in beards and overcoats, and swear they’ll never book a hotel over the internet again. Before too much longer you reach Farringdon.

The tube swings directly under Smithfield Market. This truly is ancient London. Smithfield’s (once “smooth fields”) has been a market for more than 800 years. The trade in meat has persisted for nearly a millennium. Carcasses hang from hooks in much the same way they did hundreds of years ago, but the dark side of the meat trade has been abolished. The photo above shows where witches were burned at the post and animals sacrificed. To the left is St Bart’s hospital, where several hundred years ago there was a healthy trade in luke-warm bodies. And at the market itself, you could buy the discarded wives of men who had found something a little fresher. By night, modern meat market Smithfield’s is now the nightclub centre of London. Hordes pour out of ‘Fabric’ and ‘Meet’ in the small hours and into the ancient Butcher’s Hook and Cleaver pub for a resuscitory burger.

On the eastern edge of Smithfield Market and adjacent to a ‘Men’s Lavatory’ lies Edmund Martin, ‘Tripe Dressers, Meat and Offal Salesman’. These remnants of ‘Old London’ are disappearing before our eyes. Give it 10 years and it will be a Tesco.

And the walk comes to an end where it began. I take 10 minute exposure in the Beech Street tunnel, Circle Line trains rumbling beneath my feet every 90 seconds. Stay tuned for some of the photos that didn’t quite make the cut the first time round.