London Life review – a window on an ever-changing world

Colin O’Brien’s photographs of his native Clerkenwell, football matches and the West End provide a snapshot of a fast-disappearing London

As Colin O’Brien writes in his short introduction to London Life, the view from the top-floor flat he grew up in was his “first window on the world”. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he looked down on the junction of Farringdon Road and Clerkenwell Road and shot images of people passing underneath or congregating on the corner as well as car accidents, religious processions and stragglers wending their way home on a snowy New Year’s Eve past hoardings advertising Guinness, Batchelor’s peas and Sterling cigarettes. Another London, familiar, but now impossibly distant.

If the London that O’Brien chronicled obsessively in black and white seems redolent of the London portrayed by the likes of Roger Mayne or Henry Grant, it is these early aerial shots of Clerkenwell that immediately set him apart both as a precocious observer and someone who instinctively understood that a single neighbourhood could be a kind of microcosm of the bigger human drama of the capital. The Clerkenwell neighbourhood that O’Brien grew up in was solidly working class and nicknamed Little Italy because of the number of Italian immigrants living there, hence the large Roman Catholic processions in honour of Our Lady.

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