Dewi Lewis Publishing
Published by Hoxton Mini Press
Millions pass through the square mile, also known as the City of London, yet few are aware of its true significance. These photographs of people surrounded by the City’s imposing architecture, combined with texts from an acclaimed historian, David Kynaston, begin to decode one of the most cryptic and fascinating parts of the capital.
An extract from David Kynaston’s introduction:
“I have seen the West End, the parks, the fine squares, but I love the city far better,” reflects Lucy Snowe, the heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s 1853 novel Villette. “The city seems so much more in earnest: its business, its rush, its roar, are such serious things, sights and sounds. The city is getting its living – the West End but enjoying its pleasure. At the West End you may be amused, but in the city you are deeply excited.” By ‘the city’, she meant of course the City of London.
The City has always been a world of its own: not only in the obvious sense of its distinctiveness, its apartness from the rest of London, but also because of the extent and might of its global reach, affecting distant peoples about whose daily lives and circumstances the City’s movers and shakers know little or nothing. Nor for their part do most outsiders – even in the rest of London, let alone further afield – have a more than nugatory grasp of what kind of place the City is, or how as the world’s leading international financial centre it has got to where it is now. So, briefly, some history.
Starting with the Romans, who established at the lowest bridging point of the Thames that area we know as the City, essentially as a trading centre with northern Europe. By the end of the reign of Elizabeth I, as trade flourished with almost all parts of the known world, it had become the largest port in the world. Then, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the City became an ever more prosperous commercial centre on the back of naval power and the start of the British Empire, while at the same time recognisably modern financial institutions began to emerge: Lloyd’s maritime insurance market (under way from 1691); the Bank of England (1694); and an organised stock market (originally in coffee houses, but from the 1770s in more permanent premises).
The City’s zenith came during the largely peaceful century between the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This was sterling’s heyday, as in an era of unimpeded capital flows the City willingly – and lucratively – serviced the needs of a rapidly expanding global economy. It did so in all sorts of ways, whether through its role as the world’s great capital market, or through providing trade finance (‘accepting’ bills of exchange), or through a whole range of other commercial services (organised via such institutions as the Baltic Exchange or the Wool Exchange or the London Produce Clearing House). ‘All Lombard Street to a China orange’ was a popular Victorian phrase, referring to the high probability of something happening. It was also eloquently revealing: Lombard Street (home to the discount houses which operated London’s all-powerful money market) as the very epicentre of the global machine; China as a remote, peripheral player. Put another way, the City during these years was the greatest international financial and commercial centre that the world had ever seen – and would, in all likelihood, ever see.
Then came the guns of August 1914. Over the next half-century, featuring two world wars (including physical devastation of the square mile during the second), New York largely supplanted London as the dominant centre. The City stagnated, and became, in short, a club, with an accompanying club-like mentality: conservative, complacent, exclusive. ‘Cars are black’ was one of a trio of celebrated maxims of a prominent post-war stockbroker, Cedric Barnett. ‘Shoes have laces.’ And of course: ‘Jelly is not officer food’. Yet the other side of the club coin was that it was a place where trust mattered, where most business was conducted on a face-to-face basis, and where the Stock Exchange’s traditional motto, ‘My word is my bond’, actually meant something. Most of the City’s critics rightly identified the lack of dynamism and meritocracy; not enough appreciated the preciousness of trust and the importance of the personal.
That said, the so-called ‘Big Bang’ of 1986 was arguably decades overdue. Back in the 1960s the City’s somewhat fortuitous success in becoming the main location for the Euromarkets had pointed the way to a City returning to its pre-1914 internationalist roots; but it was not until the 1980s that the Stock Exchange was opened up to foreign players – and then only as a result of fierce external pressure from Margaret Thatcher’s government. Almost at a stroke, and abetted by fast-moving technology, the City changed fundamentally: serious competition; serious money; and general Americanisation. Or as one survivor from the old days ruefully informed the well-named magazine Futures World, ‘I arrive before the tea lady now’.
It is now more than a quarter of a century since the City revolution (as it was often called). The main outlines of the subsequent story are clear enough: the almost complete failure of the long-established British merchant banks, traditionally the City’s crème de la crème, to thrive in the new, harsher world; the importation of the pernicious American dogma of shareholder value, encouraging high-street banks to concentrate less on financial stability, more on a high share price (with accompanying high bonus pay-outs); the greed and hubris that preceded the 2008 crash; the still-being-played-out consequences of that crash; and the potential threat of Brexit to the City’s international business. Most historians and commentators would accept that the City needed its revolution; but it did not need to be this way.
Any critique – any attempt to reform the City – has to end as well as begin with the human dimension and an understanding of the environment in which those humans operate. Polly Braden’s atmospheric, intensely evocative photographs remind us that the square mile is still just as much a world of its own as it was in Charlotte Brontë’s long-ago days. Yes, the modern City has become a self-perpetuating, over-rewarded island, too much cut off from the rest of Britain. But it would be a shame, even a tragedy, if it were ever to lose completely its own very particular specialness.
Exhibited at Fotofestival Mannheim, Heidelberg, 2015, DE
Dewi Lewis Publishing
Published by Hoxton Mini Press
London’s Lea Valley is strange, exciting, ugly, beautiful and unaccountably mysterious. It stretches down from the Chiltern Hills, near Luton, through east London, meeting the Thames opposite the Millennium Dome. Between the two, it’s an unplanned patchwork of nature reserves, social housing, yuppie apartments, small industries, scrap yards, football pitches, golf courses, cycle tracks, forgotten architecture and vast areas of nothing in particular. Threading it all together is the Lea (or Lee) River, and its canal. A green and wet world, close to the city. There are Londoners to who are drawn to its enigmatic allure, and Londoners who don’t even know it is there.
David and I began taking these photographs in 2004, the year we met. David only ever made pictures when he wasn’t writing. I was working on documentary projects for magazines and newspapers. Together we began to spend all our spare time in the Lea Valley. We explored mostly by bicycle with one camera, and one light meter between us. We followed the seasons. David liked landscapes with strange incidents. I was a portraitist. We both admired the best street photography. Somehow we combined all those elements, responding to light, space, colour and chance encounters. For long days we cycled and talked, looking, staring, watching, observing. Within a few months we were making the kinds of photographs neither of us would have made alone.
The Lea Valley is photogenic, no doubt about that. But how could we get the peculiar feeling of the place into pictures? And what about the social and economic contradictions? The ecological fragility? The endearingly haphazard character of it all? We just kept shooting, knowing one day we would look back at the mountain of photographs and make some sense of it.
Through the winter and spring of 2005, the mood along the Lea began to change. Parts of its southern end were to be the site of the 2012 Olympics. There was great concern the place would be destroyed. Often we found ourselves in the fields at the proposed site for the main stadium, close to Hackney Wick and Old Ford, where the Lea braids into several waterways. There was a beautiful Victorian metal footbridge, painted light blue. Someone had daubed on it: Fuck Seb Coe. Community groups were mobilizing to resist the Olympic Bid. Beyond the Lea there was little belief that London would be awarded the Games but, on July 6, it was. Nationally there was excitement. In east London feelings were mixed. On July 7, in another global context entirely, London was hit by coordinated suicide bomb attacks. It was a disconcerting time. We stopped making these photographs, got married and had two girls.
The Olympic Games came and went, and the lower Lea Valley began to come to terms with the legacy. Inevitably, we were lured back to see what had happened. Instead of pragmatic wilderness there were now landscaped parks, manicured greens, and the continuous sprouting of what property developers like to call ‘luxury apartments’. In the shadow of the looming stadium, the little blue bridge remains, the graffiti long erased.
Adventures in the Lea Valley was shown as a 150 image, 15 minute digital slideshow at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London as part of the programme London in Six Easy Steps, Summer 2005. It has been exhibited widely and published in many places including ICON magazine, The Guardian and The Independent.
Published by Dewi Lewis
‘In these intimate photos, Polly Braden captures the inner lives of people with differences and disabilities. She sees their dignity and their sometime pathos; their humour and their disappointment; their optimism and their ability to love. Above all, she documents their intense individuality, and makes you see each one as an independent being. This is not a portrait of disability, but a series of portraits of people with disabilities. It is achieved with clarity, respect, and wit.’ Andrew Solomon, author of ‘Far From The Tree’
There are around 1.5 million people in the UK with a learning disability and 700,000 with autism. Polly Braden has worked with MacIntyre, a leading national charity in the field, to show the ways in which it works with the children and adults that it supports. Her photographs look at the everyday moments, achievements and milestones. The subject is complex but the aim is simple: to highlight everyday interactions and life-changing experiences.
These are stories about the barriers faced in life, but they are also inspiring, often filled with moments of achievement in things which once seemed difficult if not impossible – from finding employment or using public transport to gaining a measure of independence, graduating from high school or getting married. Great Interactions looks to engage decision-makers and the wider public to ensure that people with a learning disability receive the same opportunities as anyone else.
Published by Dewi Lewis
In 2014, I began work on a two-year project with the charity, MacIntyre. The aim was to look at how, with the right support, people with learning disabilities and/or autism could live fulfilling lives. Throughout this time I saw hope and possibility for people who were being supported by knowledgeable and specialised care workers. It left me wondering what happens to those people who haven’t found this kind of support; the ones who slip through the net or whose disability isn’t seen as being quite ‘bad enough’ to need support. How do they cope with the daunting prospect of moving from childhood to adulthood in a world where you need to be able to manage your time, resources and relationships or face the consequences?
Out of the Shadows offers a very different view on the human cost of locking up people with learning disabilities and/or autism. The book, which is published by Dewi Lewis in partnership with Multistory, contains intimate and powerful photographs by Polly Braden, seven in-depth stories by journalist Sally Williams and three first-hand accounts. Together, their stories offer a valuable insight into how they ended up in prison and the challenges faced to find a permenate way out.
This ties in with the 10th anniversary of the influential report No One Knows which highlighted shocking failings in the criminal justice system – yet nothing has changed. People with a learning disability make up 1.5% of the population yet 7% form the prison population. Ten people have shown courage in sharing their personal stories of how they came to be in prison. These stories are disturbing, moving and important in pushing debate on why there has been no change and why people with a learning disability are finding themselves incarcerated because of failings much earlier on in their lives.
Multistory is an ambitious community arts organisation based in West Bromwich in the borough of Sandwell. They commissions acclaimed photographers, artists and writers to work with local people to tell their stories of every day life. Multistory is supported by Sandwell Council and Arts Council England.
Thank you to everyone who was brave enough to share their stories and to Multistory for their support. We look forward to continuing our collaboration in bringing these issues to light.
Published by Dewi Lewis
China Between is a photographic essay on the modern city culture of contemporary China. When the Peoples’ Republic set up its Special Economic Zones in the 1980s communist China entered into global trade and international capital. The goal was financial but new money also brought new values and new ways of life. Polly Braden’s photography is an intimate response to the material and psychological effects of the changes experienced by the country’s new urban class. Shot over three years in Shanghai, Xiamen, Shenzhen and Kunming, China Between is a revelatory portrait. Braden shows how a casual glance, a moment of doubt or a quick trip to the shopping mall can tell us as much about modern China as any image of a dam, a protest or a teeming workforce.
Exhibited at London Gallery West, ‘Broken Pieces of China’, 2009
‘These photographs are at once anthropological documents and a personal travelogue; a series of intimate portraits and, more generally, studies of a country undergoing a massive transition from a predominantly agrarian to an urban culture.’
— Jennifer Higgie, editor of Frieze magazine
In January 2020 GRAIN Projects commissioned 11 new bodies of work by photographers who collaborated with rural communities, making work in response to rural locations in the English Midlands. The diversity of approaches are significant and provide a new voice in the rural aesthetic.
This book contains eleven new bodies of work that draw our attention to some of these issues and themes. Writers Camilla Brown and Mark Durden have contributed essays to this publication that explore the themes of the work by commissioned artists and photographers Alannah Cooper, Emily Graham, Guy Martin, Leah Gordon, Marco Kesseler, Matthew Broadhead, Murray Ballard, Navi Kaur, Oliver Udy and Colin Robins, Polly Braden and Sam Laughlin.
