black and white photography by rob gardiner.

Venice, photographs on Polaroid 55 film taken with a primitive pinhole camera, part 1.

Today is Worldwide Pinhole Day. Now in its fifth year, the concept is that pinhole enthusiasts simultaneously take photographs on this specific day and post the results to a central website. Last year it garnered more than 1800 entries. I’m not usually one to join in these activities, but with my recent injury I’ve been missing photography. All manner of pinhole cameras are used on the day, homemade cameras that began life as milk cartons, biscuit tins or even empty beer cans. With my trusty sidekick lending a couple of extra arms, I set off to re-photograph an old staple. Regulars to the site are surely thoroughly fed up with the reshoots of the Eye, but I find it endlessly fascinating. Shot on a 4x5 pinhole camera loaded with Polaroid 55 film.

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All winter I have been fascinated by construction works on Ironmonger Lane in London, so much so that I ensured it was on my daily walk and I could take in the transformation. Piece by piece the entire lane was stripped down 12 inches by a 5 man team and relaid in shiny bricks that probably came from Spain. An A-Frame information board announced it was a 14 week “Street Improvement Project” and presented a badly photoshopped vision for the future complete with levitating people walking by. It was all very exciting. Without further ado, I present Ironmonger Lane 2006 (top) and Ironmonger Lane 2005 (below).

As you can see, it was worth the wait. No result less than the evidence of a complete waste of several man years of work would have sufficed. The bollards that are now in place were not part of the plan. To the planners, it may have seemed that narrowing the street would prevent the delivery vans from using that appealing ‘SLOW’ car space but it became clear early on that what they had done was create a space on the footpath that appealed even more to the delivery vans. So up came the bricks and in went the bollards.

Ironmonger Lane is part of ancient London, with a 2000 year old Roman road lying beneath. It has been called Ironmonger Lane for at least 800 years. It is one of the ribs that spur off from the spine of Cheapside (’cheap’ is Saxon for ‘market’) along with Bread St, Wood St, Milk St, and Honey Lane before Cheapside turns into Poultry. Ironmongers were one of the “Twelve Great Companies” that became London in cooperation with the Mercers, Grocers, Fishmongers, Drapers, Goldsmiths, Skinners, Merchant Taylors, Haberdashers, Salters, Vintners, and Clothworkers. The history and events that occured at this crux of a small street in London over the passage of hundreds of years I can only imagine. 900 hundreds ago England’s “2nd worst briton for the last 1000 years” Thomas a Beckett was born at the end of the Lane.

Peter Ackroyd, that great biographer of London, wrote several years ago that Ironmonger Lane has “had the same width for almost 355 years. That width was and is 14 feet, originally sufficient to allow two carts to pass each other without hindrance or blockage. It is another aspect of this continuous London history that its structure can accommodate itself to quite different modes of transport”. And so it has come to be that the 14 feet wide section lasted just 358 years, perhaps now wide enough for two mopeds to speed by one another.

After 14 weeks of gradual construction, much of the new grey bricked lane is already oil splattered and chipped at one end. How long until the next street improvement project, I wonder?

(As always, 4x5 Polaroid 55 scanned negative shot on 4x5 pinhole camera).

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.