Roger Mayne, who has died aged 85, was a photographer who captured the squalor and spectacle of Southam Street, a pocket of North Kensington that was to become synonymous with post-war poverty. The series of photographs taken by Mayne, between 1956 and 1961, are one of the most important photographic surveys of city life in Fifties and Sixties Britain. The images formed a London reflection of the deprivation photographed by Bert Hardy in Glasgow’s Gorbals, a reminder that such harsh conditions could be found only a bus ride away from Westminster. Southam Street and its W10 environs lay close to where Mayne lived as an aspiring photographer in his early twenties. On the day he discovered the street he took 64 photographs — shots which, he acknowledged, seemed “to hit people’s mental funny bone”. He worked on the move, equipped with a lightweight Zeiss Super Ikonta camera, immersing himself in the hustle and bustle of the block: a hive of activity that was as joyous as it was desperate. All human life was here. Sharp-dressed West Indians clashed with pipe-thin, trouble-hunting Teddy Boys, girls gossiped in doorways, gangs of young men smoked and gambled. And everywhere around him children darted, danced, ran, cycled and fought. Boys and girls played football in the middle of the road and cricket against the walls. Slowly Mayne earned their trust and recorded their wild, urban upbringing. One of the street urchins running riot was a young Alan Johnson — later the Labour Home Secretary — whose sister appears in one of Mayne’s photographs. “The houses had been jerry-built in the 19th century for a predicted population drift that never occurred. By the Thirties they’d been declared unfit for human habitation,” noted Johnson. “My sister and I were born into those slums 20 years later. Electricity didn’t arrive until roughly the same time as Roger Mayne. The 1951 census recorded... (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10901219/Roger-Mayne-obituary.html) undefined

More on Google