LONDON DOCKlANDS
A book of time lapse photography.
For more than a century, the London's docks were a closed book, a string of walled citadels open only to the men who worked in them, and to the Thames. The busy traffic of import and export, the endless cycle of loading and unloading, was invisible to Londoners, who saw only the high dock walls and the forest of cranes beyond.
But by the 1970s the docks were in terminal decline, at that time Paul Webster, then a young landscape photographer, won permission from the Port of London Authority to record the death throes of the six great docks: St.Katharine's, London, West India, Surrey, The Royals and Tilbury. His pictures reveal a ghostly wilderness at the heart of London, depopulated and dilapidated, crumbling under the weight of its own history.
Now Docklands has been reinvented, and Paul Webster has retraced his steps. Using his meticulous notes made almost half a century ago, he has reshot all the pictures in exactly the same locations. These new photographs are just as evocative as the first: Canary Wharf tower and its partners rise like monoliths where the rum sheds once stood; aeroplanes climb from the runway at City Airport where SS Mauretania once lay at anchor.
Sometimes three shots of the same view, laid side by side, are unrecognisably different; other times astonishing details have survived the blanket reconstruction; a faded piece of graffiti on a surviving stretch of dock wall, or a lone redbrick building amid the Eighties concrete-and-glass.
London Docklands is a unique document. Its parallel sets of photographs belong to one place, but to two millenia, almost to two worlds. Blood Alley, where dockers once cut their hands to ribbons carrying sugar cane, is now a promenade for lunching office workers; windsurfers skim the surface of Millwall dock, where stacks of Norwegian timber once crowded the quay. The very word wharf has lost its meaning: it is just an evocative name for a suite of offices in London's new Manhattan.
Through its account of the death and rebirth of the city's old ports, London Docklands tells the story of how much all our lives have changed in the space of only two generations. It is a book for anyone interested in where the new century is taking us, and what we have left behind.
email: paul@paulsnap.com
also see: http://www.londonsdocks.com